Bad Jokes, Nightmares and Long Holidays
by HotPinkCoffee
Summary: Drabbles about Marco, Eva and Peter from the Livejournal KA Verse 50-prompt table. Some humor, some angst, some fluff, and some day-to-day banality. Drabbles up for Angel, Necromancy, Underwater and Howling. Complete.
1. The Most Deserving of a Higher Salary

**Author's Note:** To those of you who have me on Author Alert, I apologize in advance for all the e-mails you're going to get. There are fifty of these total, but I'm going to try to space them out a bit.

* * *

**The Most Deserving of a Higher Salary  
**_#18 Grapes_

-/-

My name is Daniel McPherson. My name is not Wetherbee. And I am certainly not paid enough to justify hand-feeding grapes to a high school dropout.

"You know, Wetherbee, I've always wanted to do this," he says as he reclines in his sun chair, looking almost contemplative as he chews a fresh purple grape. I grunt a little, biting back the urge to tell him that of the many things I have wanted to do with my life, putting small pieces of a fruit in his mouth and waving a palm frond over him has never been one of them.

"Wetherbee. I don't pay you to be bitter," he sighs melodramatically. "What do I pay you seventy-five an hour for?"

"To happily perform the whims of Marco the Magnificent," I sigh in recitation.

"And?"

I grimace. "And to let you call me Wetherbee."

My name is not Wetherbee. The boy calls me Wetherbee. His snickering, idiotic parents call me Wetherbee. The mindless paparazzi that chase him down write me up in the tabloids as Wetherbee. But as soon as I find another job where I can make several hundred a day for suffering fools, I will never, ever be called Wetherbee again.

"That's right," the boy says, pulling his sunglasses down to look at me and faking a terrible British accent, "now run along to the shed and get me my tanning oil."


	2. Parlor Talk at the Cemetery

**Parlor Talk at the Cemetery  
**_#14 Unrequited_

This is, bar none, the most miserable day of Jordan's life. Her mother asks her to sprinkle some of Rachel's ashes on the ground, as a sign of respect, and even though Jordan doesn't want to touch it, doesn't want to hold her sister in her hand – oh God, what if it's the burned remains of Rachel's hair? Her skin? – Jordan's not going to argue with her mom today. Not when Naomi can't even make it through a sentence without sobbing.

After the funeral, after Tobias thank God takes the urn before Jordan has to take a handful of the pathetic dirt they're calling her sister, she heads to the reception, the one that's for Rachel's friends and family only. It's bad catering food and a lot of halfhearted she-would-have-wanted-us-to-be-happy's that are never followed up by actual happiness, and she ends up sitting next to Marco. For some reason, she's really surprised that his eyes are as red as everyone else's.

"Hey."

"Hey. Nice service, huh?" He says while pushing some food around a paper plate with a fork.

"Yeah." Jordan mimics that, because honestly these cold cuts look about a week old and her mom probably paid way too much for them. "I thought you and Rachel didn't like each other."

Marco shrugs. "We disagreed a lot because, no offense, your sister was kinda nuts. But she was a friend. A good friend."

Jordan nods like she knows, but really, the only way she remembers Animorphs Rachel is Rachel yelling, Rachel snarling, Rachel snapping at her teammates, angry, proud, warrior Rachel who's so different than her sister.

She starts to cry, again, because God, she's just fourteen and her sister's dead and here she is eating bad cold cuts and all she can think about is how if her sister were here, she'd tell her to suck it up.

Marco reaches and puts a hand on her shoulder, but doesn't say anything. Finally, Jordan, desperate to talk about anything else, even if it means relinquishing one of her oldest secrets, says "you know I had such a crush on you?"

Marco laughs. People stare at him like he's doing something wrong, even while they're still talking about how they should celebrate Rachel instead of just mourn her. "You're pretty cute too, but Rachel would kill me if I ever looked at you like that."

Jordan sniffles, trying to gulp down all that fat sadness stuck in her throat, feeling suddenly awkward and so much like the teenager she is now that she's self-conscious about the snot running down her face in front of a boy. "You mean she would have killed you."

"Nah," Marco says, meeting her wet gaze with his own teary eyes, "Knowing Rachel? If I ever try to hit on you she'll come back as the nastiest poltergeist the world's ever seen."


	3. Life Philosophy

**Life Philosophy  
**_#22 Innocence_

_-/-_

In his memory, he was nine years old and sitting on the couch while his parents watched the news. That was the way Sundays usually were whenever Jake wasn't over – after dinner, they'd watch the news and then watch a movie if his dad and mom didn't have any work to do, or he'd play a videogame if they did. Marco wasn't especially fond of the news at his age, but his mother insisted that he at least be exposed to it, and wouldn't let him play Nintendo unless he watched Tom Brokaw with them.

There was some report on about Neo-Nazism on the rise in Germany, which Marco didn't really understand beyond that it was bad. His father gave a deep sigh. "It's just so sad people like that still exist. It's been more than half a decade."

His mother gave a bark of laughter. "Sad? You think that's sad? I think it's absolutely hysterical that a bunch of white trash who probably couldn't spell their own names without checking their wallets are going on about how they're the Master Race."

"That's not what I meant, Eva," his father said.

"Well, getting down about it doesn't make them any smarter. You just need to find the funny aspects in it," his mother chuckled, "not that that makes them any smarter either, but it's more fun. They're ignorant clods. Stupid. Asinine."

He stared at his mother with shock that she'd dare use the A-word. His father, seeing the look on his son's face, chortled. "Asinine isn't a dirty word, Marco."

"Asinine is a great word," his mother said loftily. "It applies to so many people. It just might be my favorite word."

His father laughed. "Are you sure you only had one glass of wine?"

His mother giggled and leaned her head on her husband's shoulder.

Marco doesn't remember what happened after that, but the memory of that moment never fails to resurface when it would be just too easy, too temptingly easy, to let the world win.


	4. Your New Life

**Your New Life That Has Nothing to Do With You  
**_#28 Pearl_

-/-

Eva's wedding ring is a simple silver band inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a much more practical and less gaudy piece than her garish diamond engagement ring. It's perfect for keeping on her at all times because she doesn't have to worry about it breaking when she does the dishes and it fits nicely into the lines of her fingers when she clenches her indignant fist over the telephone. When Peter had slipped in on her finger she'd allowed herself a rare moment of letting fall the public composure and had a few tears squeeze out.

In fourteen years of marriage it's never left her hand, and yet Edriss pulls it from Eva's finger with neither hesitation nor commentary, and discards it.


	5. Brake Pedals

**What Do You Mean You Can't Reach the Brake Pedals?  
**_#39 Rush_

-/-

"Marco, what are you doing?"

"I'm adjusting the seat, if the Almighty Xena doesn't mind."

"Why does adjusting the seat take fifteen minutes?"

"Because if you haven't noticed, my dad's six-foot-one and I'm…"

"And you're?"

"…Less than six-foot-one. Anyway, I think I got it now. Okay, Rachel, ready to stare death in the eye and spit at it?"

"You know, if it was anyone but you driving, I'd say a trip around the block is easy, but knowing you this is going to be more terrifying than any Yeerk-killing adventure."

"Please, we haven't smashed some skulls in almost a week. You're dying for an adrenalin rush."

"Maybe. But I'm also not looking forward to getting grounded for driving around the block with an unregistered driver. Some of us actually have lives beyond hiding in our basement with our Playstation."

"My Playstation is in the living room, thank you very much, and if we get pulled over you can just, I don't know, pull your top down a little and flirt."

"Did you just suggest what I think you just suggested?"

"Ow! I meant, if we get pulled over you can go African elephant and stomp on a cop car. You happy now?"

"Better. Marco?"

"What?"

"Why are we still in the driveway?"

"Oh. Yeah. That."

"You don't know how to drive stick-shift? Even I know how to use a stick-shift, and that's just from being a functioning human being."

"I know how to drive stick-shift! I've done it a thousand times in Cruisin' USA! It's just, you know. Parking brake."

"What about it?"

"I can't pull it up."

"Are you pushing the button?"

"No duh I'm pushing the button. Who do they make these things for, Arnold? Maybe I should just morph gorilla and give it a good yank-"

"Oh, for God's sake, let me."

"Okay. Massive upper arm strength is a good look on you, Rachel."

"How about "shut up and drive" is a good look for you? How many hours do you need to log anyway?"

"Fifty. And I was hoping you could bless every single one of them with your rays of cheer and warmth."

"Fifty?"

"Fifty."

"…Just shut up and drive."


	6. Everything Has an End, Even Success

**Everything Has an End, Even Success  
**_#6 Voyage_

-/-

"Marco? You're being unusually quiet," Peter said, peering at his son over his wine glass. Eva lifted an eyebrow curiously as well, and despite the way Marco was always the center of attention these days, tonight it made his lungs tighten.

"It's this new thing called silence. I thought I'd _try it_," he said, smiling as his parents chuckled, "but I didn't think you'd _buy it_."

Peter smiled and went back to eating his dinner, but Marco could see that his mother wasn't going to let it drop that easily, even if she'd leave it until after dinner. Instead, he steered the conversation towards the way the TV show production was going, and this new villa he said he had his eyes on, and what was up with Jay Leno these days anyway? Eva wondered out loud why Marco didn't get a girlfriend with a brain, and Peter gushed about some of the new Andalite technology he was getting to handle at his job, and their weekend dinner swirled into good-natured conversation as usual.

It wasn't until Marco was out by the doorway that Eva confronted him about it. She raised an eyebrow at the burning cigarette in his hand and said, "you really should quit that."

Marco smirked. "You're really worried about an Animorph getting lung cancer?"

"No, I trust you. I just don't want your father to get started with it again," she said simply, then put a hand on his shoulder and whispered "now what the hell was all that about?"

He didn't know what to say. After everything, he didn't want to lie to his mother, but he'd made a promise to Jake to keep things top-secret, and unfortunately, that included family members who just might try and intervene. Family members whose families had gone through too much to let honor and loyalty and aliens mess it all up again.

"Marco?" She asked again, eyes insistent.

He wanted to hug her, to touch her one last time to remind himself why he started fighting this war in the first place, this war that was never over, these goals that, when accomplished, fell down to reveal even more goals behind them. But he couldn't do that because then he'd never stop hugging her, and Jake would never be able to pull him onto that stolen spaceship and go get him killed.

So he just put out his cigarette and said "take care of Dad. He'll probably need someone to take care of him."

And before she could respond to that, before he could see the fear in her dark eyes, he kicked off his shoes and sprinted down the driveway, feathers etching down his arms as he went.


	7. Girls with Ribbons

**Girls with Ribbons, or, the Official Death of My Dating Life  
**_#48 Ribbon_

-/-

It takes a special kind of girl to wear a pink ribbon in her hair to school. A special kind of girl named Gail, in this case, who just happens to sit two rows ahead of me in the sensory deprivation chamber they call a ninth grade history class.

Ribbons are a certain kind of feminine, the kind that says "please unravel this ribbon from my chestnut locks and run your strong, manly, ever-so-adept fingers through my hair as I shout your name, Marco, Marco, Marco". You'd never see Rachel wearing a ribbon, because if anyone ever tried to unravel it she'd rip his arms off at the sockets. And you'd never see Cassie wear a ribbon because that would imply that she knew what a hairstyle was. But the Gails of the world, the freshman girls outside the secret Animorphs lair of lies and body horror, they can wear ribbons.

And let's face it, once you look at her ribbon you just feel obliged to look at the rest of her.

So is it my fault if I got an F minus on my last history quiz, really? And come to think of it, what kind of rotten teacher hands out F minuses? Isn't there some rule against squishing a student's self-esteem beneath your red-inked, ironclad toe like that?

Sometimes she'll look over her shoulder at me and I swear she winks at me. And I mean, who wouldn't? I'm adorable. And she's adorable, so we'd make babies so adorable they'd have to pass zoning ordinances banning other cute babies from being in the same neighborhood, just because the adorability factor would kill people on sight.

She's looking me over and thinking "hmm, that Marco dude, he's so charming and witty, I bet he's got tons of beautiful girlfriends and I shouldn't even ask him out" and I'm giving her the stare-down trying to send a telepathic message to her of "dear Gail, I am actually currently without girlfriend, you should fix that for me" and she's thinking "he's so dreamy but his body would be too short to be an intimidating host-"

Wait.

I throw down my pencil. Jake shoots me a concerned look. I sigh, lean over and tell him "the stupid slugs just ruined my day without doing a damn thing" and immediately get a detention for whispering in class.

Figures.


	8. When

**When  
**_#41 Ache _

-/-

"I don't understand why we have to have so many damn interns running around. That's local-level crap. You'd think a government agency could afford to actually pay for someone who knows what they're talking about," one survivor says to the other. She picks up her empty coffee cup and gestures with it. "Did you know that yesterday one of the interns didn't know what the Berkin Bill was? I mean, it's only been in the Senate for more than a year. I swear half of those crusty old bastards we call the DNC will have died off by the time that thing actually gets through."

"Well, better for me," Naomi sighed. "You have no idea what a pain it is to negotiate hate crime charges. You even bring up the word "hate crime" and suddenly no one's even paying attention to the case anymore. Talk about juries with agendas. Talk about _judges_ with agendas."

Eva pursed her lips. "When does that _nothlit_ assault case you're working on get out of prelims?"

"April 8th, if we're lucky. The judge is dragging her feet, though – oh. Sorry." Naomi says as Eva's face darkens. "Well, you asked."

Eva pushes on the bridge of her nose for a second. One year. One year since her son ran off into space on some suicide adventure because the stupid Berenson boy still had him wrapped around his finger. But she picks back up on the conversation, because the window dressing of their careers comes out of her mouth more easily than the topics that will make her throat seize up. "You're right, I did ask. That's pretty soon, for such a complicated case. At least, from my limited knowledge of the court system, but let's face it, all you do is strong-arm each other and pick fights during the prelims, so we might as well be in the same profession."

Naomi laughs, a little too loudly, a little too falsely. "We're all spin-masters at the end of the day. The difference is that you're telling bad liars what laws they put into place and I'm telling bad liars how to ignore those laws."

Eva orders more coffee, and they chatter for an hour. As she finally gets up to leave, she quietly asks Naomi "does it ever get any better? Does it ever get easier?"

The look on Naomi's face tells Eva that it doesn't, that it never will, and that there's no lawyer blustering or political posturing that will ever be enough to convince anyone otherwise.


	9. A Lightbulb Moment

**A Lightbulb Moment  
**_#4 Dim_

-/-

A box of twenty-five forty-watt lightbulbs and a foot-ladder are all Marco needs for this task. The lights in the kitchen are out, rendering the room impenetrable after sundown, and even though his dad said he'd fix it it's been about a month with no way to safely microwave a Hot Pocket past six p.m. Marco's not surprised; his dad has so many more important things to attend to than basic household safety, like staring at the television and ignoring his old boss's phone calls.

Maybe a foot-ladder, lightbulbs and a growth spurt. Marco wobbles a bit on the ladder, a few inches too short to reach the burnt bulb. There's a spider-web hanging from the light – gross – and Marco dismounts the ladder to find a broom to sweep it off. During his search he notices his nightstand, eyes up the dimensions, and climbs up on top of it. It tips a bit, but it should hold the foot-ladder just fine.

"Dad, do you think it's safe to stack the ladder on something?" he calls to the slumped figure on the living room couch. When he doesn't hear an answer, he follows it up with "well, I'm going to do it. Fixing your lightbulbs."

No answer again, so he adds, "and then I'm going to drop out of school and sell drugs", and when that goes without response, assumes his father's either asleep or possibly dead.

Armed with a wet rag for the spider-web and holding the new forty-watt in his teeth, he sets up the nightstand and the ladder and clambers up. The metal of the ladder digs a noisy gouge into the top of his nightstand, but he reaches up to the ceiling and uses pressure to keep his balance. He throws the rag down onto the counter after it's been used, but he realizes he doesn't have enough hands to hold the old lightbulb and screw in the new one, so he tries to drop the old one lightly onto the counter. It shatters, and he casts a frightened look at the living room, but his dad doesn't seem to have noticed. He takes his hand from the ceiling and takes a tentative step from the rung of the ladder to the stand.

Before he can react, one of the ladder's legs slips off the nightstand and everything goes tumbling with a loud clatter. He lands on his hip, shoving a hand down to the floor to protect his top half, and feels the remains of the old lightbulb bite into his palm.

"Ow, shit! Goddamn!" he yells, then pauses for a second to hear if he's going to get chastised for swearing or being so stupid as to stack a ladder on a nightstand, or to be asked if he's alright. No sound from the living room.

"Goddamnit, that really hurt?" he says loudly, putting his bleeding palm to his mouth and feeling the sting of tears in his eyes. The sun is setting outside, leaving the kitchen dim and lonely.

Marco wraps the wet rag around his sliced hand, turns on the newly replaced light, and quietly reminds himself that lightbulbs aren't the only things that go out.


	10. The Whole Truth

**The Whole Truth and Nothing but the Truth  
**_#49 Nightmare _

-/-

"Well, that's something we're not going to repeat," Jake muttered, helping Tobias hobble over to the table. "What were you thinking, jumping off the roof like that?"

"I don't know! I just had like, this amazing vision and hearing and all these feathers and I just thought, I could catch some beautiful thermals…" Tobias sat on the table, turning so Cassie could get a look at his ankle.

"Thermals?" I snorted. "What the hell is a thermal?"

"It's a column of hot air," Tobias sniffed, "and it's not like you were making all that much sense, sitting in the corner crying about killing your mom or something."

"Hey, Cassie said this stuff was therapeutic," I said weakly.

Cassie looked ashamed, her cheeks turning as red as the foamy, bloody toothpaste around her mouth. The toothbrush in question lay in the barn's sink.

I continued. "Besides, at least I wasn't knocking over all the cages and chasing a rat around the barn like you and Rachel."

"I was a hundred percent convinced that rat was a lion," Rachel said, but she blushed a bit and looked down at her bloody knuckles. "And that that sandbag was a giant centipede. It made sense at the time."

Cassie, bandaging up Tobias' leg, grimaced as she looked back at the sand all over the barn floor. "My dad's going to kill me for this, you know."

"At least I showed that giant centipede who's boss," Rachel groused.

"Yeah, Rachel, that was seriously more interesting than Jake. All he did was stare at his history textbook like it was going to eat him," I said. "Was it? Most of us were babbling gibberish and you were just staring at your book. I have no idea what was going on in your head."

Jake's eyes got wide. "I suddenly understood it all, you know? All that stuff about the Civil War and families torn apart and brother against brother. It all started making sense, just…" he trailed off at the blank stares.

"Yeah, well, at least you didn't think you were a bird like some people over here," I said as I jerked my thumb at Tobias.

"Shut up," Tobias protested half-heartedly. "You were crying."

"Yeah," Rachel added, "and you took off everything but your bike shorts and stowed it all in the back. None of us needed to see your naked torso."

"Seeing my naked torso is a privilege!" I shot back.

Jake sighed and rubbed the back of his head. "Can we at least agree on something?"

"What?" we all asked.

"We're never, ever dropping acid in Cassie's barn again."

All at once, we replied with an "amen", and I went to the back of the barn to find my shoes and shirt.


	11. The State of Things

**The State of Things  
**_#31 Pendulum_

-/-

His mother is dead, a body at the bottom of the ocean, a broken, brittle little bag of bones at base of the mountain, a beaten, burned bit of refuse in some Yeerk dungeon, somewhere.

His mother is alive, and she'll come home someday, with some kind of strange healing power so strong it'll seep into her soul and unstitch all the scars of slavery.

His mother, he thinks caustically, is a casualty, and whatever crater he houses in his head over it is just the cost of a war waged on women and children.

His mother, he pleads with himself, is a prisoner just as prone to escape as any person pinioned to a keeper.

Marco knows that the key is balance. To swing too far to either side forfeits his reason to fight, or his ability to act. The team needs the cold strategist, but the cold strategist needs the functional boy to survive. And functional boys need their mothers, probably, even off in some abstract sense.

His mother is a murky memory mixed in with everything else he misses that doesn't exist anymore.

His mother is a goal, and he's going to get her back.

A corpse and a cause lie at either side of the arc, and the best he can do is return, as always, to a center equally far from both.


	12. Are We Supposed to Regret?

**Are We Supposed to Regret?  
**_#42 Lion_

-/-

"We need to talk."

"Not here. Two Animorphs together, paparazzi will start a mob riot." Marco takes Cassie by the hand and drags her into a private room in the club, waving for one of his bodyguards to try and handle the photographers outside. "I take it you were the osprey following the limo?"

Cassie tries to hide how sad it makes her that he's still paranoid enough to notice that. "I got a call from a Mr. Sheldon at work. I had my secretary set up a time for me to call him."

Marco's eyes narrow. "Sheldon, like David Sheldon?"

Cassie nods slowly.

"Shit," Marco says, motioning for the other bodyguard to leave the room and maybe come back with something slick and boozy. "Of all the people I never wanted to hear about again, David would probably be on the top of that list."

"Yeah. I guess I just hoped that – I don't know, this is horrible, but I hoped they'd died without knowing. But apparently both his parents are alive and looking for him." Cassie sighs deeply, uncomfortable in this glitzy environment. Talking about David makes her want the comfort of her animals and her paperwork with diagrams of reservoirs and bridges.

"Why are you telling me about this?" Marco asks, sitting down at the white booth chair in front of a low glass table. His leg bounces a bit nervously. "If you think Rachel told me what she did with him, I can tell you right now that she didn't."

Cassie bites her lip and shrugs. "I wanted some advice on what to say. You knew him better than I did."

"That's bullshit and you know it, Cassie. I barely knew the guy beyond that he was a sociopathic nutjob who wanted us all dead. You're the one who knew him well enough to outsmart him into that little trap," he says coldly, with a raised eyebrow.

Cassie's eyes flash, but she sits down across from him without a retort. "I just wanted a second opinion on how to talk to them about it. I mean, how do we explain that?"

"He was trying to kill us. You can preface it with 'did you know your son was a wannabe serial killer?' or you can congratulate their excellent parenting skills, if you want."

Cassie doesn't say anything to that. She just sinks a bit into herself, shoulders slumping.

"What are we supposed to do, Cassie?" Marco continues, voice a bit more gentle now. "Are we supposed to regret?"

"I don't know anymore, Marco."

He gives her a self-deprecating half-smile. "Figure it out, then."

She nods a bit, eyes still downcast. He brings his jittery leg back to stillness, and leans his head on his palm. The stylishly dim light in the room does nothing to alleviate their moods.

"You know," Cassie says suddenly. "I hadn't thought of David in a few weeks, before they called. And they're probably thinking about him every day."

Marco exhales deeply. "Probably. I didn't think about him either. I had other things going on. We did a lot of things back in the war."

"It's funny how it was probably the most important thing that ever happened to that family, and we don't even really think about it most days."

"Cassie? There's absolutely nothing funny about that. And I know funny."

Marco's bodyguard comes back in with two glasses and a bottle of something fruity. He sets it in front of them before leaving the room. Marco cocks his head at Cassie, a silent inquisition into her opinion on alcohol.

"Why not?" Cassie says darkly as she pours a glass for both of them.

"We should toast."

"To what?"

"To not being rats?" He shrugs. "Sorry, that wasn't funny either."

"Yeah, it really wasn't." She lifts her glass. "To laying things to rest?"

"No." He shakes his head and clinks his glass against hers. "To figuring things out."

The alcohol makes Cassie flinch a bit, so much she almost misses what he says. She swallows hard and thinks about it for a second, eyes closed, her mental image of a white rat slowly fading to a blood-mouthed lion, only to be replaced by David's father's face, and then by oblivion. "I can live with that."


	13. Grapplegate Snarkers Society

**Grapplegate Snarkers Society  
**_#9 Running_

**A/N:** Only coherent if you've read Everworld and Gone, and maybe not even then.

-/-

"I'm telling you, I used it first. I get dibs on that word," Marco said, a little bit hotly.

"Yeah, but I practically reinvented it. I mean, 'subma-freaking-chine guns'? 'Pyra-freaking-mid'? You never got anywhere near that amount of creative swearing," Christopher Hitchcock shot back, posturing just a little bit over the younger, shorter teenager.

"But shouldn't I get the freaking patent? I mean, 'oat-freaking-meal' was around before you were even a glimmer in KA's eye. Heck, 'oat-freaking-meal' was forty different Livejournal icons before you were even a concept!"

"Do you need to remind me how dated you are, Mr. 90's? No one uses Livejournal anymore except fanficcers and people who can't figure out Twitter."

"I'm surprised, with your creative vocabulary, that didn't turn into Twit-freaking-ter," Marco grumbled.

"The second half of the word needs at least two syllables."

"That didn't stop you with 'lepre-freaking-chauns'," Marco pointed out, and Christopher turned a bit red.

"Look, the point is that you can have 'this is insane', but 'freaking' as a modifier is my running joke, not yours. I mean, 'rice-a-freaking-roni'! Really, man!"

The turned around as they hear the sound of slow clapping. Howard Bassem, raising an unimpressed eyebrow at them, said "are you two done jostling for the Academy _fucking_ Award for a comedy script?"

"You can…do that?" Marco gasped.

"What, an ironic slow clap?" Howard sneered.

"Figures the guy from 2008 would try and one-up us with his edginess." Christopher sighed and crossed his arms. "Oh, and there is no Academy Award for comedy scripts."


	14. Keeping Score

**Keeping Score  
**_#24 Fury_

-/-

Eva says, I try not to keep score.

But I can't help but count down and see that I got sixteen years with my son and you got twenty, and you got eighteen with your other son.

And I know your son was never the same after the war, but neither was mine. When I think of him as a little boy he always forgot to close the door when he ran in the house, and he was excited every time he picked up the phone because it might be a friend.

And then his door had four different locks on it and he had two bodyguards in the house and he still didn't sleep well.

Then he waited for person on the other line to speak before he said "hello" every time someone called, even though it was always a manager or a starlet or a reporter.

Did you know that the doctor said he needed blood pressure medication once? Apparently morphing doesn't fix that and all that paranoia is bad for your body.

Now he's gone and I'm getting very good at counting all the holidays and birthdays and mother's days and father's days and weekends that we would have had together, even though I'm trying not to keep score, and I'm not saying your son is the reason why.

But Jean, just give me a moment to spit whenever the name Jake Berenson comes up.


	15. Make an Appearance

**Make an Appearance  
**_#7 Step_

-/-

"Do you really have to wear five-inch heels?" He says, craning his neck up – and up – at his now six-foot-four supermodel date.

"Why?" She asks sweetly, bending down – and down – to kiss his cheek and push his bangs back. He swears she does that just to emphasize the height difference.

"You know why," he says, pushing his bangs back over his forehead petulantly. "Do you really need to be a foot taller than me? I'm your date, not your Chihuahua, and contrary to popular belief I don't fit into a purse."

She rolls her eyes at his hair, but doesn't push the bangs issue any further. "Maybe you could get photographed standing next to Tom Cruise. Then no one will notice you're short."

"But I'm going to get photographed standing next to you, and I'd rather not look like a little kid in comparison."

"But these shoes make my legs look good."

"They do make your legs look good. That's because you have good legs. Legs that would still look plenty good in flats." He straightens his suit jacket a bit and fiddles with his shirt collar so it looks just a bit stylishly unkempt. "Come on, the limo will be here in a few minutes. You have time to run upstairs and change to shoes you can walk in."

She pouts. He considers that if he didn't have a thing for leggy supermodels, maybe this wouldn't be a problem. Maybe he should just find some nice short actress or heiress or something next time.

"Are you telling me that Marco Salazar Laroche," she sighs, emphasizing every syllable of his unwieldy chosen moniker, "savior of Earth, prodigal son of Hollywood, face on every teenage girl's wall in America, is afraid of looking short next to a supermodel?"

"I didn't know you knew words like 'prodigal'," he says with a little more poison than he intended. She looks hurt. He exhales heavily, checking his hair one last time in the mirror. "Fine. Wear whatever shoes you want. Just remember, whenever I'm standing on the curb, you stand on the street."

And with that, he takes her by the arm and they set off to mug a few hundred cameras before the night is through.


	16. Pulled in with the Tide

**Pulled in with the Tide  
**_#37 Cascade_

-/-

"If you're looking for Marco, he's at the scoop," Eva says, barely looking up from carving a spear from a fallen branch.

"That's what I figured, given that it's actually quiet out here." Rachel sets down the bag of groceries. Canned vegetables and Spam and the instant cheesecake you can make over a campfire. Can't expect Marco's family to eat tree bark – would never hear the end of it if she didn't provide a substitute.

"He is a noisy one, isn't he? That hasn't changed." The wistfulness in Eva's voice is too deep to be concealed. Rachel can hear it, even though Marco's mother has such a biting edge to her voice that usually covers such indiscretions. "You're Rachel, aren't you?"

Rachel nods.

"You were the Hork-Bajir, weren't you? On the pier?"

Another nod, this one more cautious.

Eva sighs, taps her nose a bit, then looks up at Rachel. "I'm sorry you didn't get to meet me in a better headspace. I put you at risk with my little tantrum."

Rachel sits down on a rock. "Hey, you were entitled to it. And nobody knows a little rage-out like I do."

"I should have known you'd be the most understanding about rage-outs, if what Marco's been saying about you is true."

Rachel lifts an irritable eyebrow. "Yeah? What's Marco been saying about me?"

"That out of a violent group of resistance fighters, you're the most violent. That you're emotional in battle." Eva doesn't seem to bother sugaring her words. Rachel wonders if that's where Marco got his lack of tact.

Rachel wants to defend herself, but any display of anger will just prove the point further, so she furrows her eyebrows and twists her mouth into a grimace. "What are you saying?"

"I'm not saying it's a bad thing. Not at all," Eva says, to Rachel's surprise. The woman's face darkens. Her knife gouges chunks of wood out of the branch. "God knows we've got reasons to rage. I don't think there's a minute left where I don't rage."

The blonde girl bites her lip and runs a hand through her hair; the brunette woman splits long shavings from the tip of her spear before continuing "it'll be interesting to see what happens to us raging women after the war."

"Does it scare you?" Rachel asks, taken aback at the sight of what might be a kindred spirit. Someone else who understands that rage is a current that whisks away your senses, that it's a waterfall that fills up your inside caverns, that it's a deep swamp you can't find your way out of. That it hits in cascades and tidal waves and drowns what you once were, leaves who you were dead somewhere beneath all that rage and all that adrenalin.

Eva holds eye contact with Rachel. "Doesn't it scare you?"

"What's it to you?" She says, because she can't quite admit how fast and how hard the rage hits, how quick it is to sweep her away.

"It's nothing to me how you feel about it. Of course it scares me. I thought freedom would make me happy and all it does is make me angry. Just," Eva pauses for a second as she checks the tip of her spear, balances the weapon in her hand, wraps her hand around it, "can't let it make me do anything stupid."

Rachel's cool blue eyes scrutinize Eva, but can't find anything to argue with. "Well, we made it out fine, freak-out or not. I get it, about the rage thing. It's easy to get carried away."

Easier, even, to drown.

Eva nods, picking another branch up out of her pile. She considers it for a moment, then tosses it next to Rachel. "Make yourself useful," she says.

Rachel gives her a quizzical look.

Eva pulls a knife from her belt and hands it, handle-first, to Rachel. "Make a weapon."


	17. I Know Gregor Samsa

**I Know Gregor Samsa, And You Ain't No Gregor Samsa**  
_#23 Spider_

-/-

For some reason, it doesn't quite hit Marco how much his life is Weird, and not just a little but constantly, unrelentingly, regularly, capitalized Weird, until they read Kafka's _Metamorphosis_ in English class. It's not when it takes him a minute to understand what the teacher's talking about when she says the tension comes from none of the characters caring much that their family member's turned into a cockroach. It's certainly not from the idea of turning into a cockroach itself.

It's when Jake mentions after school "Samsa had good eyes for a roach" and Marco responds "no kidding, I'd need to morph wolf spider to see in that much detail" that he realizes that they've crossed the border into surreal a long time ago and aren't getting back any time soon.


	18. Okay

**Okay  
**_#32 Parting_

-/-

"Marco, are you okay?"

Eleven years-old, he stares back at his vice principal, the evil dictator of arbitrary school regulations about bringing Gameboys to class and going past the school fence for lunch. And despite the fact that for the last two months nothing has been okay, that nothing will ever be okay with his mom dead and his dad unemployed and nearly comatose on the couch, he puts on a peppy smile and dryly says "of course I'm okay, Mr. Chapman, sir. I just couldn't wait to get back to this place, you know. So much learning about totally useful stuff like the Dewey Decimal System."

-/-

"Marco, you okay with this?" Jake asks privately, still holding the termite in a vial. The termite, like the ant in so many horrifying ways, scrabbles blindly at the glass walls, desperate to return always to the colony.

The idea of morphing an ant still makes Marco feel like vomiting all these weeks later, but without missing a beat he smirks and responds "Jake, I don't know about you, but I'm dying for a taste of that wood-pulp a la mode."

-/-

The last night at his parents' new house before he moves to his new beachfront mansion in Santa Barbara, he has nightmares that even his steady diet of Ambien can't ward off. His dad's firm hands are on his shoulders, pulling him into a sitting position, retrieving him from some hell of blood and pincers and oceans. The inside of his mouth hurts where he bit down. He gazes blearily at his father in front of him and the accumulations of things packed haphazardly into cardboard boxes, ready to go tomorrow.

"You okay?"

He smiles. "Shouldn't have had that burrito before bed, right? Nothing but trouble."

His father, embittered by so much time being lied to and hard, world-shaking revelations, doesn't get up off the bed.

"Dad, really, I'm…" Alive. Rich. Confident. Healthy. Human. And things are going well, interviews and ghostwriters writing a biography and parties where he gets let in underage. _Things_ are okay. "I need some sleep before the big move tomorrow. The paparazzi will give me hell if I have dark circles."

Shaking his head, his father leaves, and Marco reassures himself back into slumbering in the house he'll leave tomorrow.


	19. Giving Up the Ghost

**Giving Up the Ghost  
**_#15 Coming_

-/-

You know you should. You know that the way out is just a few phone calls and fifty hours a week and actually getting up off the couch. You know it's past time to leave behind all that guilt and shame and self-pity, all those old friends who tell you it's okay to just curl up in the dark and let the world go on without you. You know it's time to give up on you and your self-hatred allied against a life full of sharp edges and things that need doing and people that need talking to; you know that the more boxes you unpack and more floors you sweep the more your brain rots and the easier it becomes to crawl back home twice a week and barely make rent; you know that every day your son's a little older and a little more numb to seeing you camped out in front of the television, and the worst thing is that you know all this and you have known for a long, long time now, but knowing doesn't fix things.

You know it's time to let go.

So you pick up the phone and your heartbeat rushes and you inhale too fast and you close your eyes because the light's so bright and so new.

"Hello, Mary? Yeah, it's Peter. Peter Laroche…yeah. That Peter. Is Jerry there? Oh, okay. Can you tell him that I can come in on Monday?"


	20. You Could Be Jenny McCarthy

**You Could Be Jenny McCarthy and You're Going Out Like That?  
**_#3 Illusion_

-/-

"So, Erek?"

"Yes?"

"If you can use your hologram to look like just about anyone or anything, why did you choose to give yourself that haircut?"

"I happen to like to be inconspicuous, Marco. I know it's something you don't have much experience with, being as loud and obnoxious as you are, but some of us don't shrivel up and die if we get ignored for more than twenty minutes."

"Erek, Erek, Erek, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about their being a difference between inconspicuous and, well, just kind of ugly. That cut makes one of your ears look bigger than the other. It's distracting. Rachel would agree with me."

"Somehow I doubt that fixing my hair is going to get you to actually focus on what we're here to do."

"Which is what, again? I'm too busy picturing you with dreadlocks. Were you ever a Rastafarian in a past life?"

"Marco, you told me if you didn't past this history test you'd have to retake the class."

"I did, didn't I?"

"You did. In fact, if I recall correctly, you said if I helped you pass this test, you'd refer to me as Supreme Rover Android History Master of the Universe."

"Do you really want me to call you that?"

"No, not really."

"Good. I wasn't planning to. Have you ever considered a mohawk?"

"You're stalling."

"Because I know they're kind of out of style these days, but you could probably pull off the punk look and not have to pay for all those piercing and tattoos."

"Marco. Roman emperors. Claudius, Caesar, Constantine. What do you remember about them?"

"That Constantine first appeared in The Legend of Swamp Thing. Or maybe it was The Saga of Swamp Thing."

"I'm sure your history teacher is going to be thrilled to know you spent more time studying comic books than your textbook."

"Yeah, I'm banking pretty hard on him being a fan of Hellblazer."

"You didn't spend any time studying, did you?"

"Nope."

"I'm shocked."

"And before you call me lazy, it's because we're going after the AMR this weekend and I didn't want my dad's last memory of me to be of me making flashcards on the Holy Roman Empire for a stupid history class that I'll forget by the end of the summer, if I live that long."

"Whatever you say, Marco."

"At what point in my life will I need to know about the Romans, anyway? I'm pretty sure Visser Three isn't going to capture us and be all "I have you, Andalite bandits, and I could kill you or I could have you tutor me in Earth history, but only if you know about the Romans". I can pretty much guarantee I won't be thinking of how awesome it is that Visser Three kills me so I don't have to take my pointless history final. I can pretty much tell you that there is no good reason, not one single good reason, for me to care about the Romans beyond passing this class, which I wouldn't even have to worry about passing if the Yeerks hadn't decided to contaminate the burger supply the week before my final paper was due."

"Marco?"

"Yeah?"

"You're ranting."

"Shut up, Erek."

"As much as I hate to enable your bad study habits, if, hypothetically, you were out finding the AMR on the day of the test, it's possible your Chee doppelganger would have to take your test for you…"

"Erek, you are one godly dogbot, have I told you that lately?"

"Of course, you'd have to go look for the AMR on the day of the test."

"Are you kidding? Jake and Cassie are both in the same class. Of course we'll rush headlong into death if it means we don't have to take Mr. Halloram's test."

"You should still study, just in case. We could probably get through up to the Goths by eight if you paid attention. Don't roll your eyes at me like that."

"I wasn't rolling my eyes. I was just thinking."

"About?"

"I was thinking of how you could look like anyone, anyone in the world, and the best you could come up with was a kid with a lopsided haircut."


	21. Chemical Warfare and Enslavement

**Chemical Warfare and Enslavement as Conversational Topics  
**_#29 Stride_

-/-

"Wait up, Shaq. What's the rush?" Marco said, trying to keep from panting too audibly.

Jake stopped and leaned against a chain-link fence to wait. "X-Files starts in half an hour, and if we don't get there soon Mom will claim the TV and watch cooking shows."

"Yeah, well, just don't forget that we don't all get to be seven feet tall. And I'm carrying about twenty pounds of gym clothes in my bag." He tossed his backpack at Jake, who caught it with a grimace. "Unless you want to take it off my hands."

"Are you sure the fumes won't kill me? I mean, I know you've got a built-in immunity…"

Marco laughed. "Big words from the guy whose gym locker has been known to cause mass hysteria. Remember your tupperware of oatmeal last year? Because I'm sure the janitor does."

"I still don't think Chapman should've given me a detention over that," Jake said, and then with an approving grin from Marco, joked, "only an alien would be that harsh." It felt good to laugh about it. It felt good knowing that they still could.

"Serves you right for bringing oatmeal to school," Marco chided. "Oatmeal as biological warfare, patented by you first. Well, let's not leave Agent Scully waiting."

Jake held the backpack out. "Aren't you going to take this?"

"Nope," he said with a smirk. With a sigh Jake slung it over his shoulder, and destined to lead and destined to follow, they headed to Jake's house.


	22. Logic

**Logic  
**_#34 Bronze _

-/-

"I'm sorry, am I waking your highness?"

"Did I complain?"

"No, but you were thinking about complaining. That's just as bad. I saw that look on your face."

"How can you see my face in the dark?"

"Pregnancy gives me superpowers. Look, you're rolling your eyes right now – aha! Don't you ever doubt my ability to toss and turn and stay awake long enough for my eyes to adjust to pitch darkness."

"I didn't roll my eyes."

"You were thinking it."

"Well, I have work in the morning."

"I have seven months of baby strapped to the front of me. I win. Here, put your hand here, it's the belly monsters."

"That's him kicking?"

"Mmm-hmm. That's him doing gymnastics, it feels like."

"Feisty little guy, isn't he? What do you think he'll look like?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, do you think he'll be some pasty white kid like me or will he get some of your bronze coloring?"

"Bronze? That's the word you come up with, bronze?"

"Well, you know, golden, sun-kissed, summery…"

"Oh, Peter, go back to electronics. You're crap at poetry."

"You know what I mean."

"He's fucked either way, you know? Either he's got skin cancer by the time he's twenty or he's completely unemployable."

"Ha! Should you be swearing around him?"

"What, like he can hear it in there? If he could hear me he wouldn't be kicking around when I'm trying to sleep."

"Good point. I hope he lucks out of my nose."

"And gets my girly nose?"

"Maybe. He could inherit a lot of good things from you."

"Not too much, though. I'd rather he be like you. There's only so much of me I can stand at a time and the world could use more uncorrupted sweetheart nerds."

"Well, I can stand most of you most of the time."

"See what I'm saying? You can teach him how to sweet talk and I can teach him how to look over his shoulder and between our teachings, he can off and impregnate the world without consequence. Don't laugh, I'm serious, mostly!"

"Uh huh. Either way, he's going to be a special kid."

"No, he's going to be a completely average and unexceptional kid in every regard. Of course he's going to be a special kid. He's ours, after all."

"I love him already."

"Me too. I know it isn't logical, but I love him and all he's done so far is give me morning sickness and kick me in the ovaries. Hell, you had to date me for two years before you heard the magic words, and all he has to do is be born. It's not fair, is it?"

"Nope. But no matter how much you pretend, you're not always logical, Eva. It's life."

"Mm. Baby?"

"Yes, Eva?"

"I love you."

"I love you too."

"Can you get me some of the watermelon ice cream from the freezer?"

"I thought you didn't have cravings past the fourth month."

"But you love me."

"I guess that beats logic, doesn't it?"

"Always. Don't forget the spoon."


	23. KISSING

**K-I-S-S-I-N-G  
**_#16 Call_

-/-

"Rachel, it's your boyfriend!"

"Jordan, for the last time, he's not my boyfriend and even if he was, I'd still forbid you from ever talking to him. Or maybe if you did, you'd stop thinking he was so cute. He's got the brain of a monkey."

"If he's not your boyfriend, why is he calling all the time?"

"Because we're partners in biology class. Now scoot and give me the phone."

"Is biology class the way you say S-E-X?"

"Jordan! Don't make me ditch you next time we have to babysit Sara! Hello? Marco?"

"The brain of a monkey, huh?"

"On a good day. What's up?"

"Your sister thinks we're an item, that's what's up."

"Very funny. What's really up?"

"You know that project we have for biology? So, it turns out Jake and Cassie are working on a similar project, and Cassie's got a lot of empty space on her farm and we should all study together, or something."

"How long do you think this is going to take? You know I can only handle you in small doses. Jordan, get off the other line!"

"Anyway, it looks like this might be a late night project, you know, with…capturing night crickets. Stupid assignment, right? So you might want to tell your mom you're spending the night at Cassie's."

"Okay. When should I get there?"

"Sometime after dinner, I guess. We're lucky. This isn't one of those urgent projects like we usually get."

"Goodie. You know I like just tackling these things on our own terms. I guess I'll see you in a few hours, unfortunately."

"Through the heart, Xena. Speared through the heart. I'll be waiting with roses and chocolate! Bye."

"Oh, shut up. See you later."

"I know what you're up to, Rachel"

"Jordan? I thought I told you to stop listening in!"

"I know you're speaking in code. Special biology project that'll take all night? Puh-lease, Rachel. I'm not stupid."

"…What are you even talking about?"

"Rachel and Marco, sitting in a tree, F-U-C-"

"Hah. Right. You're totally getting babysitting duty next. Now scram."


	24. Baby Aspirin

**Blanket (Baby Aspirin)  
**_#19 Blanket_

-/-

Times like these, Peter remembers that he's incredibly lucky his kid is generally healthy. Eva always used to take care of Marco when he was sick, and now Peter's woefully unprepared to nurse his proud, stubborn son back to health.

He should have known that Marco would come down with the flu as soon as he learned that Jake had it. Less than a day after Jake was brought home vomiting up a lung, Peter got a call at work from some classmate of Marco's, Cassie, asking if Peter could please come pick Marco up before he ruined someone else's hydrangea bushes. About fifteen minutes after he got off work at five, he drove up to find his son sweating, shivering, and most definitely emptied of whatever they'd been serving in the cafeteria.

Now he gets home and finds his son bundled up under several blankets in his room. Peter sets the Winco bag down on the nightstand. "You feeling any better?"

Marco, face buried in pillows and a comforter, lets out an irritable groan.

"I brought you some things."

"I hope it's a new stomach. I really hope they sell those at Target. It is a new stomach, right?" Marco mutters, looking up and blinking in the sunlight. Red imprints from the pillow line his face.

Peter takes a seat on the bed. "Well, no. It's ginger ale and saltines. Jean said they're all Jake can handle right now."

Marco grimaces and shoves his face back down into his pillow. "I really wanted the new stomach. This one sucks."

Peter sighs. "I know, Marco. But Jean says it'll probably only last a few days, so just try to get some Saltines down."

A grunt. Peter hopes that it's in agreement, but who knows.

"And I brought you some baby aspirin."

Marco turns his head just enough so Peter can see a disapproving glare. "I'm almost fifteen years-old, Dad. I think I'm old enough to have real aspirin, not like I could keep it down anyway."

Peter shrugs defensively. "I don't know, your mother always did this. Give me some credit for trying."

"Sorry," Marco mutters, not sounding all that sincere about it, but Peter tries to remember that stomach flu is no fun and everyone's allowed a little crankiness when they're sick.

"Well," he continues, "I've got a date tonight, so if there's an emergency, all the important numbers are by the phone."

"I know how to dial 911, Dad," Marco grumbles, rolling over and curling up in the fetal position. "You're ditching me for a date?"

Peter blushes a bit, and sheepishly tries to explain, "well, we have tickets to this classical recital, and they're non-refundable…"

"Whatever," Marco cuts him off. "I'm probably pretty boring right now. I'll just lay here figuring out how to amputate my guts, thank you very much."

Peter gives Marco a hurt look, but his son's not going to fall for that. "If you need anything, you can call."

"Uh huh." Marco pulls the covers up over his head. "Don't have too much fun without me."

"Eat some Saltines," Peter says, getting up to go, and thinking for the tenth time today that Eva would have been so much better at this than he is.


	25. Blessing is Just Another Word

**Blessing is Just Another Word for Permission  
**_#46 Unchained_

-/-

Okay, everyone, settle down. I know you all really want to get to the cake but you have to put up with me first. I was supposed to prepare a speech. This should come as no surprise to Nora, but I didn't do an ounce of preparation. So I'm just going to wing it and wow you with my improvisation skills.

I never saw my dad get married the first time. Duh. But he cleans up okay. I'd say you should wear a tux to work every day but you look like your bowtie's about to choke you. Nora, seriously, don't expect him to look this good in three weeks.

Anyway. My dad and I…we've been through a lot. Together and on our own. And there was a really long time when I thought I'd never see you happy again, ever. And now, well. I guess life's full of surprises. The Cubs can beat the Giants, Rachel cries at weddings and my dad's sitting there with a doofy grin on his face in a tux. It's such a Kodak moment it almost hurts.

I guess I never really said it, but I'm proud of you, Dad. I know that's a weird thing to hear from your kid, but it's true. Oh, man, don't start crying _again_, come on. You keep that up and I'll make fun of your tux some more.

Nora, I can't say anything bad at you when you're making my dad smile like a kid with a new Nintendo game over there. You gave me an A on a quiz once, so you can't be all bad. The only thing I'll complain about is your taste in dogs, promise.

Yeah, I know some of you only attended this wedding for the cake. I'll wrap it up.

Dad, Nora, you make each other happy. And it took me a while, but now it makes me happy too. I guess you just can't deny what's right in front of your face. So, I know you've been waiting ever so patiently for this, but Dad? You have my blessing to marry this woman. Have a good one.

But I'm so going to revoke this blessing if you make me watch honeymoon slideshows. Really.


	26. Handed Down

**Handed Down**_**  
**#10 Unready_

-/-

"Look, I know you don't want them. Mom said I had to bring them over. Just take them," Jake argues.

Marco looks down at the box of clothing Jake's outgrown as if he expects Jake to reveal it's all a really unfunny joke. Finally, he looks up at Jake and cocks an eyebrow.

"Mom said you don't take them, they're going to Goodwill. She figured you'd want first dibs on the good stuff. I mean, there are some nice t-shirts in there. I don't always dress like a dweeb."

Marco laughs at that for a moment, then scoots the box with his foot into the hallway. "Jake, when you're not dressing like a dweeb you're dressing like a dork. Now can you get these out of here?"

Jake sighs. "Mom says we need to look good for our first year of middle school, and you know, with your dad…"

Marco gives Jake that silencing look that says he knows exactly what Jake means and just doesn't need hear it. He breathes deeply, then grabs the cardboard box by the edge and drags it back into the living room. Jake exhales in relief that this isn't going to turn into some really awkward moment with tears or yelling – not that Marco ever does that, but Jake always worries, just a little, when this sort of thing comes up. It's been less than a year and he's been trying not to make it obvious he's treating Marco with kid gloves, trying to figure out if Marco needs them. He turns to leave, giving a little wave.

"Jake?" Marco calls.

"Yeah?"

"What, what, _what_ am I going to do with a Phil Collins t-shirt?"


	27. Mixing Milk and Sugar

**Mixing Milk and Sugar  
**_#25 Frosting _

-/-

Jean leans over the stove to watch her friend work, tossing an eggshell in the wastebasket as she does so. "So how is this manjar sauce different than dulce de leche?"

"It isn't," Eva says, stirring milk and sugar methodically, "except for which country you're eating it in. My mother always called it manjar, and who am I to tempt her ghost?"

"Huh. Well, thanks for helping. I've just been sending out so many manuscripts that I completely forgot to put an order in at Baskin Robbins, and anyway, this is probably healthier for the kids."

"Maybe the dairy will counteract with the half-ton of sugar I put in it," Eva laughs. "I needed to get out of the house anyway. Peter's been intolerable ever since his mother got diagnosed. All he does it watch television and take time off."

Jean scrunches her eyebrows together. "Shouldn't you be there for him?"

Eva shrugs and stirs.

Jean imitates the shrug, stirring batter with a little more whimsy than Eva's precise repetitions. "Well, Marco seems to be taking it well."

"He won't even notice she's gone. She was already lost in La-La Land before he was even born. If you ask me, cervical cancer is just God's version of a mercy kill, but Peter doesn't want to hear it, and that's why I'm not there feeding his misery," she says matter-of-factly. "Do you mind if I put more sugar in? It's a bit runny, and I'm not looking forward to the sugar rush Marco will get off this, but Jake doesn't seem like the kind of kid who runs around and knocks things over as soon as he gets a spoonful."

"Use as much as you need. I'll try and do damage control by only letting them have one cupcake each. Not that that will do any good if your kid licks the frosting off the top of all of them like he did last year," Jean chuckles.

Eva grins. "Self-control isn't his strong suit yet. Thanks for taking him off my hands for the weekend. He's at that stage, you know, the question stage."

"Oh, no. With his gift of gab?"

"Mmm-hmm. He wants to know everything about everyone and that includes 'why does that lady have two chins?' and 'Mommy, why is that man in the cop shirt following us around the store?' and all those sorts of awkward things. All the time. Non-stop."

"Jake's never been a talker like that. Tom was, and that led to its fair share of dragging him away from guests and giving him a stern talking to, but Jake's just quiet."

Eva turns the heat down on the stove and moves the pot over to the counter. "He's going to be the strong, silent type. Girls will love it."

"Maybe. Steve used to be like that, before he went into private practice and had to advertise himself. Certainly drew me in," Jean says, pouring her batter into the little cupcake molds. A series of little plastic sports decorations lay on the table for later use. "I get the feeling Marco will turn out to be the class clown. You see how pleased with himself he looks when he gets a reaction out of people."

"We can only hope. Better he be a comedian than a pouting wallflower like his father." Eva dips her finger in the manjar sauce, licks it, and raises her eyebrows approvingly.

Jean playfully scolds, "You're only saying that because you're cranky. You'd be proud if he turned out like Peter."

Eva relinquishes a smile. "True. I would. I'd be very proud."

Jean peeks out the window to where their sons are playing before putting the batter into the oven. "You can only hope, right? You never know what they'll be like when they grow up. You can only hope they'll turn out to be good, upstanding men. The world needs more of those."

"I don't think you have anything to worry about," Eva says, also peeking out the window. "I'm sure they'll surprise us, and I'm sure they'll be fine."


	28. Good Teamwork

**Good Teamwork  
**_#47 Surrounded_

-/-

{You take the three on the left, I take the four on the right.}

{Please, Marco. Like I can't handle a few Hork-Bajir? Or did you forget that my grizzly can bench-press your gorilla up to the moon?}

{Well, fine, Xena, you take the four on the right and I'll take the three on the left. But I'll have you know that you fight like a girl.}

{I fight like a _what_?}

Glass, blood and bodily organs are tossed about willy-nilly as four – no, five – Hork-Bajir are decapitated, disemboweled and otherwise rapidly vivisected by a very enraged grizzly bear.

The gorilla punches one Hork-Bajir and uses a metal dolly as a baseball bat to remove another alien's head from its shoulders, clarifying {you fight like a warrior princess who rips heads off twice as efficiently when someone says you fight like a girl.}


	29. Dead Weight

**Dead Weight  
**_#43 Good Luck_

-/-

He has his mind made up. I sit on the grass with the transponder, clutching my one significant contribution to this whole mess. He's standing, and while he's never been tall and will never look it, he does seem larger, somehow. More intimidating. More important, like I just finally realized what a huge portion of my world he makes up. And I probably just have.

"You're sure I can't come along to help?" I ask for probably the tenth time, looking for some assurance that it's not that I'm some unloving husband refusing to save his wife, not some self-absorbed father sending my son out to war in my stead, but that I'm a helpless bystander.

"No offense, Dad, but you'll just be dead weight," he says, running a hand through his hair. "I don't want to have to worry about you and Mom, and you already did enough for us building this radio techno thing."

As if tinkering with my space toys quite compares to his death-defying stunts that he pulls every day, even though he's only fifteen, even though he's only a kid, even though he's my son and I can't understand why that became less important than saving the world. "Marco, if you can't bring Eva back…"

"Dad." He gives me a very level stare. "No matter what happens, if you even think about doing that thing again where you watch the TV on mute, I'm going to set that TV on fire. We're not doing that again."

Part of me wants to defend myself against that, defend my position as the infallible dad, but there's no point because it's incisively true. "No, we're not doing that again. Just be careful. Be careful, please-"

Before I can finish saying that, he's down next to me embracing me. My son, who has never been all that fond of hugging, tells me "I know what I'm doing, Dad. I've done this more times that you want to know."

I sigh. "Don't make me lose you too. Be careful. Watch your back. And bring your mother back."

He stands up, nods, and walks away to join his fellow soldiers. I look back down at the transponder and before tinkering with it some more, issue a silent prayer for him to come back alive and accompanied, and a whisper of thanks that he came back all those times before I knew to hope for his safe return.


	30. Partners in Petty Crime

**Partners in Petty Crime  
**_#44 Trouble_

-/-

When Rachel needs to sulk and sort through her emotions, she always goes flying with Tobias. Being so high off the ground gives her some literal perspective, and seeing all the people bustling around like ants reminds her of why, exactly, she's sacrificing her soul in this war. The little circles of multicolored hair and hats give a visual to the multitude of people for whom she gave up her teenage years, that should, by all rights, have been the domain of brief and fiery relationships, loitering at the mall, gymnastics practice and awkward fights with her mother about curfew.

But when Rachel needs someone to accompany her as she gets into a little harmless trouble, she turns to Marco.

"Well," Marco says, "I guess that's the closest I'm going to get to Jake's handwriting. It doesn't sound too mushy, does it?"

"I thought it was supposed to be mushy." Rachel picks up the note from the table and pins it to the barn door.

"Well, you know, mushy enough to be really embarrassing, not mushy enough to clue her in that we wrote it. Although now I'm worried that she'll think it's real, and that Jake''ll never speak to me again."

"Oh no, Marco," Rachel says with a wicked grin. "I think the fact that you misspelled every single word in "lustful passion of your sinful embrace" will clue her in just fine."


	31. Family History

**Family History  
**_#27 Alien_

-/-

"Why does your mom talk funny?" Jake asks one day, taking bites out of a peanut butter and jam sandwich.

Switching from right side-up to upside down on the monkey bars, and then back again, Marco asks "what do you mean?"

"Well," Jake says as a chunk of his sandwich falls to the ground, "sometimes she pronounces words weird."

While Jake investigates his fallen piece of sandwich and ponders the efficacy of the Five Second Rule, Marco realizes that he never noticed his mother's accent. "I don't know. I guess she's from Mexico or somewhere."

It suddenly occurs to Marco that his mother is not only his mother, and that her life did not begin the day he was born.


	32. The Force of the Blow

**The Force of the Blow  
**_#20 Bloody _

-/-

"How is he?" Eva asked, setting her briefcase on the table. Her husband sat at the table, a fresh, hot cup of coffee already prepared for her, a little caffeine to take the edge off phone calls whose implications exploded in her mind.

"He's just fine. Angry. Complaining, as usual, but mostly he's just pissed off that he's missing the big soccer game later today." Peter said, motioning for her to sit down and turn this into a discussion, not a drive-by briefing.

"Like he's any good at soccer," Eva snorted, succumbing to her husband's beckoning and cradling the warm mug in her hands. "What's the cost of the damage?"

Peter shrugged. "Cut lip, bloody nose. Nothing serious. He's only suspended for today because Mr. Jennings said he wasn't the one who threw any of the punches, he was just, you know how he is, running his mouth off and all. I have him on time-out because it just isn't common sense to keep sassing someone after they've already punched you in the nose once, but he's just playing with his Sega in his room. Figure he's okay."

Relief soaked into Eva's features. "After Chapman told me he'd been sent home for getting in a fight, in my mind, he was missing teeth with a lawsuit and an expulsion on the horizon."

Sensing the distress still stewing just beneath the surface of her skin, Peter reached over and cupped his hand over one of hers, the warmth from the coffee seeping out from between her fingers. "It's rough when you can't protect them."

"We get him bike helmets and shin pads and weather-resistant coats. What we should have invested in is a mouth-gag." Eva twisted her mouth into a soft smile and gently stroked Peter's fingernails with her thumb.

"Limitations, huh? At some point he's got to start making his own mistakes. Can't shield him forever," Peter said, letting the full weight of parenthood, that ever-shifting fluid task, sink onto his shoulders. "Not that that stops us trying."

"When did the universe get permission to have us not be the gods of his little world? Who said we can't protect him from everything?" Eva laughed. "I think we're more upset about this than he is."

Peter matched her chiming laughter. "I don't know about that. He was really looking forward to getting his scrawny hinder kicked at soccer."


	33. Training Wheels

**Training Wheels  
**_#26 Metallic_

-/-

Now that he's turning sixteen, whenever his dad has to go to the dealers Marco gets to size up everything on the lot, so he can drop enough hints as to what kind of car he wants when he gets his license.

"What about this one?" He hovers his hand just above the metallic finish. "Horsepower like this, I might finally get around to bringing girls home with me. In pairs and triples, even."

His dad laughs. "You'll be lucky if I get you a go-cart covered in pillows and bumpers."

"Admit it, you're trying to sabotage my dating life."

"What? Women love safe, responsible drivers with anti-lock brakes and four-wheel drive."

Marco raises his eyebrows and grins at his dad. "What if I told you I can drive a pickup truck across a busy suburban area at seventy miles an hour?"

"I'd tell you Need for Speed Two doesn't count as driving experience," his dad chuckles. "Just resign yourself to the Volvo, buddy."


	34. The First Time Peter Met Eva

**The First Time Peter Met Eva  
**_#13 Seduction_

-/-

The first time Peter Laroche met Eva Salazar, they were freshmen in college. He was majoring in electrical engineering and she was in the communications department, but everyone had to take core humanities, and they found themselves in a study group together. She had a cute accent and a certain distaste for bullshit, and they walked back to the apartment complex near campus together a few times. He asked her out for coffee and she laughed and said he was too sad and romantic, and they went their separate ways.

The second time Eva met Peter, he was a grad student in computer science and she was getting her master's in poli-sci. She remembered why she hadn't dated him in the first place, but he promised to keep their coffee dates unromantic and un-sad, so she agreed to one. One became two, and then twenty, and bold, cynical Eva could always pierce through Peter's tempestuous moods and flights of fancy with some dagger-like quips. But as vulnerable as he was, her particular brand of wisdom never hurt him, and when he moved to Oregon to pursue a Ph.D, she wrote him wry, detailed letters about California and the goings-on therein.

The third time they met, Eva was waiting for him, her best friend and personal pet project, at the airport terminal. Peter had dropped out of getting a Ph.D – which Eva thought was a good thing, because who really needed one of those? – when he found out he could get a great job back in San Diego. When he saw her at the gate, he pulled her close and kissed her, and after he stumbled over some excuse about impulses and how it wouldn't happen again, she laughed in his face and kissed him back. It was at that point that they decided that "best friend" didn't adequately capture each other.

Some thousandth time Peter met Eva, she was a dead woman walking, a revenant, arms laden with guilt and missing years to bring him. Every movement she made was a blessing for surviving and a punishment for giving up on her, for being so stupid as to give up on impetuous Eva. And for weeks in the woods they loved each other out of sync and out of key, until one night he confessed some small misdeed of his, and she was laughing at him, laughing the bitter, world-weary laugh she'd laughed since she was a child, laughing at him like when he pronounced her name with a hard E on the day they first introduced themselves, and they weren't survivors in a war anymore, but just sad, romantic Peter and laughing, cynical Eva.


	35. Sick Day

**Sick Day  
**_#36 Mountain_

-/-

"Oh, thank God you're home," Eva says as she kisses her husband. "You have no idea what I've been going through all day."

"What, has he gotten worse?" Peter asks, worried.

"Oh, no, he's fine. I think he just ate too much candy last night." Eva shakes her head and slumps onto the couch. Her coffee cup stands half-full, precariously perched on the edge of the table. "He's just got a terminal case of unfunny."

Peter sits next to her, switching on the television. "So he can go back to school tomorrow?"

"Whether he can or can't, either he's going or you're staying home to take care of him. I don't care if your degree gets you twice what I make. I can't work from home with him trying to do Good Morning, Vietnam." She rubs her temples; Peter leans down and comfortingly rubs her ankle. She smiles.

"Dad!" Marco thunders down the stairs, both hands on the side-rails, with a grin on his face. "Knock knock!"

Eva sighs and Peter looks up from the couch expectantly. "Who's there?"

"Shelby."

"Shelby who?"

Marco breaks into a fast, off-key version of "She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain When She comes" in a manner that suggests he doesn't remember how the actual song even goes. Peter chuckles and Eva forces a giggle.

"That's very funny, kiddo," Peter says.

Marco beams. "Mom, since I'm all better, can I call Jake and ask if I can go over?"

"Yes. Please do. Make sure you tell Jean _all_ of your funny jokes, sweetie, and don't forget to put the phone back on the hook when you're done," Eva says, then looks over at Peter with a raised eyebrow when Marco bounds out of the room to the kitchen phone. When Peter hums a bar of "She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain", Eva raises a finger and points it as his nose. "No. No. Not you too. I heard that joke fourteen times today."

"I thought it was cute." Peter smiles apologetically. "He's just emulating you, you know. He sees you tell jokes so now he wants to tell jokes. He worships you, Eva."

"Maybe next time he worships he can speak in tongues. His jokes would probably be funnier," she says, grabbing her mug of coffee from the table and taking a sip. "I'm going to hunt down your sister for giving him that book of knock knock jokes, right after I hunt down the head of Tylenol. I think they put stimulants in their children's medicine."

"Yeah, well, I'll take him next time. I'll even take him and Jake to the go-carts on Saturday, if you want the day off."

"Bless you, you sainted man," she says as she leans against his shoulder.

Marco rushes in from the kitchen. "Mom! Dad! Mrs. Berenson says that I can come over!"

"Good. Dad'll walk you over there and you can tell him all of your jokes!" Eva says gleefully. Peter good-naturedly pushes her away.

"I got one I forgot to tell you, Mom! Knock knock!"

Eva plasters a smile on. "Who's there, honey?"

"Olive."

"Olive who?"

"Olive you," Marco says proudly.

After a second of silence, Peter says "oh come on, you have to admit that was cute" and Eva lowers her head and laughs.


	36. Somehow, Things Come Back

**Somehow, Things Come Back  
**_#35 Mystical _

-/-

Eva comes home from work and finds her husband sitting in a darkened room with an old magazine and red eyes. "Did you know that I don't have any pictures of him from when he was eleven until he was fourteen? Now that it matters anyway. Would've lost them in the war anyway," Peter sighs.

After months of this, Eva's had enough. She throws her keys down on the table. "For God's sake, Peter, there's no body! Don't you understand what that means?"

"Eva, they found the wrecked ship. There was blood in it. Just because they haven't run all the tests yet doesn't mean it doesn't belong…" Peter stops, puts his hand to his mouth, makes a choking noise as fresh tears work their way down his face.

Eva puts both hands on the table and puts her face up close against her husband's, the perfect line of her nose contorted with the creases of rage. "There's no body. I thought you'd know by now. How can you not possibly know by now, Peter? After everything we've been through?"

Peter stares back at his wife uncomprehending.

"Nobody ever dies for good unless there's a body." Eva grits her teeth and points to her own face. "No matter what it looks like, people always come back."


	37. Muscle Memory

**Muscle Memory  
**_#2 Piano _

-/-

The funeral is by far the least anticipated part of a really unhappy few weeks. It's crowded and foggy and everyone's wearing black and he's supposed to stand there on display, crying like a good little bereaved son and accepting handfuls of pity from strangers who only know him from photographs at his parents' workplaces. He's sick of it before they even get to the cemetery – by bus, because the car got repossessed – because he knows exactly what's going to happen. The priest is going to ramble on about this woman he didn't know and every time he uses the past tense, it's going to drill a little further in that she's really dead, and even if there's no body in the casket there must be one getting eaten by crabs in the ocean.

Marco doesn't have to believe it, he knows. People would understand if he was still convinced she was alive and just taking a long time getting home. But he's the practical sort. He knows there isn't any point clinging to hope that a woman can swim for five weeks straight.

Still, the priest doesn't have to rub it in.

There's a reception after the funeral, which is even worse. It's just an excuse for people he doesn't know to talk about how weird it is to bury a coffin with nobody in it, and how sad it is that Peter lost his wife and his job so close together, God bless him, and she was so young, blah blah blah. He and his dad sit at a fold-up plastic table. His dad just stares blankly at the cold potato salad with red-rimmed, swollen eyes. Marco stops politely acknowledging all the adults who come over to give him pitying hugs, tell him in baby talk that they're sorry for his loss, as if he's a little kid, as if it's their God-given goal to spend the day reminding him he lost something. Finally, after one person too many reminds him that he has her eyes, he storms out, knocking over one of those stand-up platters full of tiny sandwiches. People stare, but if there's any day to excuse bad behavior, they suppose that this is it.

After pushing his way through however many rooms in the funeral home have people in them, he ends up in what must be a room for entertainment. White carpet, chandelier, big piano in the corner with the lid propped up. Probably for weddings, and he thinks that it's probably a harbinger of great things if you're going to get married right next to where they're burying dead people. So romantic.

The first thing Marco does is snarl and knock the piano lid back down, then scuff his dirty shoes all over the fluffy carpet. Fine, make whomever cleans it up as pissed off as he is. He slams the heels of his shoes into the carpet until his legs are shaking and he's breathing hard.

And then, looking for something else to take his anger out on, he turns to the piano, and knocks the sheet music onto the floor, slams his hand down on some of the low notes, stomp on the pedals. He took piano lessons for about a year when he was eight, because his mom made him, even though he hated it. He dreaded every Wednesday when they'd go to lessons and the teacher would chastise him for not practicing, and his mother would purse her lips and barely contain her irritation, and he'd just be more determined to do everything off-tempo and with as little grace as he could muster.

Silly thing to be angry about now.

He takes a breath, trying again to hold back the tears that have been itching at the back of his eyes all day. Silly, to remember the fights they had over the stupid piano, until she was so fed up with it she let him quit. Stupid fights over stupid things, stupid memories he never thought he'd miss, stupid memories because it makes it a little bit easier to let go when she's not a saint, makes it a bit harder to let go when she's a human being. Was a human being.

He doesn't remember the position, the note names, the verses. Flickers of muscle memory inform him a few lines of songs he used to know. The notes don't sound like they do in his memory and he tells himself it's because of the stupid piano being out of tune, not that it's because he's playing the wrong keys. But before Jake's mother comes to find him and ask if he and his dad would like a ride home now, he does manage a halting, one-and-a-half handed version of "Send in the Clowns".


	38. The Antidote to Girls

**The Antidote to Girls  
**_#17 Juice _

-/-

Becca almost jumped out of her skin when she saw little Marco totter towards her, bawling and with copious amounts of red liquid oozing down his face. _Oh God I'm going to get in so much trouble_ she thought, then abashedly banished that notion and tried to focus on the fact that a kid in her care was apparently bleeding from his head.

"You big crybaby!" Rachel yelled, bounding after him and standing on top of the day care's picnic table so her accusatory pointing would be even more dramatic.

"Rachel, get off the table before another one of you breaks your head!" Becca shouted, a bit more harshly than she meant to, but she had an injured, crying kid to take care of. She pulled Marco closer, trying to inspect the damage on the squirming five year-old. "Tell me where it hurts, Marco. Point it out to me."

"We were just playing," Rachel pouted as she jumped off the table, but Becca didn't hear because Marco chose that moment to scream "Rachel poured juice on my head!" at the top of his lungs.

"She…what?" Becca asked, sighing the last syllable with relief and chiding herself for not realizing how watery and sickly sweet-smelling the "blood" was.

Marco took a few quick deep breaths as he shifted from crying to just mad. "A whole juice box! She poured it on my head!"

"And that's why you were crying? This is just…cranberry juice?"

Fresh tears welled in Marco's eyes. "Dad says this sweatshirt came from Wiggly Field."

Rachel chose this moment to try and make her daring escape, but before she left Becca shot her a look that told her that there was still a talking-to to be had.

"Wiggly…Wrigley Field? Oh, oh, kiddo, the juice will wash out. It's not ruined."

The little boy didn't look sated by this revelation. "Rachel didn't even say sorry."

Becca sighed, getting a pack of baby wipes from the cabinet to try and clean Marco up with. "Well," she said as she sat down in front of him, "girls are like that. Sometimes they do silly things and don't apologize."

"Why?"

"Because," Becca bit her lip as she tried to think of an excuse, "because that's how girls say they like boys."

Marco's eyes widened. "But girls think boys are gross."

"That's just what they want you to think," she said with a grin.

Marco grinned back somewhat deviously, stained sweatshirt and wet hair entirely forgotten as he bolted out of the room chanting "Rayyy-chul liiikes me, Rayyy-chul liiikes me!"

Becca got up to go bring him back and wipe the last dribbles of cranberry juice from his head, but then sat back down on the floor with a smile. Maybe she wouldn't have to give Rachel a talking-to. Maybe this was payback enough and then some.


	39. Dog Eared

**Dog-Eared  
**_#40 Caress_

-/-

Women get scared off when I tell them I'm a widower. I can't blame them. They assume that I'm still in love with a dead woman, that I pine and grieve and still think about her all the time, and I'm an honest guy, so I don't disagree with them. Any who gets to know me past the superficial has to learn someday that I still have my days where I'll stumble onto some old memory of her and lose my breath, or where I can barely look at my kid because he has her mannerisms down perfectly. Eva's not gone, never entirely, and I wouldn't want her to be. I wouldn't pretend she is.

But I'm finally at the point where an empty pillow on the other side of the bed is an empty pillow, where I can think about touching another woman and she's another woman and not someone who could be my dead wife, and my therapist said that since the dating service match-ups don't seem to be working out, it's time to try and make connections again. I don't know if I should be using my therapist for dating advice, but I guess when you pay by the hour you can tap them for whatever wisdom you want.

So lately the parent-teacher conferences have been dragging past their half-hour allotment. I've started getting involved in Marco's school life again, much to his chagrin, and unfortunately his algebra grade has slipped so far down that meeting his teacher has become a weekly thing. He's got my gift for numbers, but he either refuses or forgets to do the homework, and that's put him right on the edge of not passing. I get the feeling that if I'd been with it enough to answer more questions when he was struggling in middle school math, he wouldn't be having trouble paying attention to it in high school, but I'm supposed to be working on not fixating on the past.

But gradually the meetings with his algebra teacher, Nora, but I should probably call her Ms. Robbinette, have been less about Marco and more about math. It just happened that way. Math is the easiest thing in the world to talk about. So I've started bringing my old battered college textbooks in, because I've always been a bit of a packrat and there's still so much fascinating stuff in them for Nora. If education hadn't been her calling, she might have gone for her Master's in mathematics.

There have been a few meetings so far where Marco's fledgling C minus hasn't come up, I'll admit. But other things start coming up. What started as an explanation for how such a smart kid did so badly in his prerequisites turns into an explanation for why I failed to help him with his homework or even make sure he did it for two years, and all those explanations for what the situation is now, and how I'm trying to crack the dating market, and she is too, after her engagement to someone else got broken off a few years ago. And we end up talking about life and death and love and responsibility and the comforting stability of numbers and code.

During one of the meetings, in a conversation that started out about Fibonacci and ended up about loneliness, she puts her hand over mine and asks if I'd be interested in getting coffee with her.

So that's how it started between us. I think Marco hates it, but it's getting hard to tell with him what's anger, what's normal teenage passive-aggression and what I need to be worried about, so unless he says something about it I'm going to assume he'll get over it. At least I agree with him that the dog I could do without.

But for the first time, there's Nora in my life. Not just a woman, a love interest, one of the many faces that aren't Eva's, but a distinct woman that I love. I can put up with a dog for that. For once, I'm thinking of moving forward and not just moving away from the past. That has to be worth something. The question has always been whether she can put up with what I bring to the table.

One night in the car, after a beautiful series of concertos at a local college, we're sitting in the car and I look at her and say, "Nora, if we get serious about this, you know, I'm a package deal."

She laughs. "Peter, as crazy as it may seem, in our many meetings I've picked up on the fact that you have a kid."

"No, I mean…" And I feel my chest constrict a bit. "Eva's ghost. Not literally. But we never fell out of love; she died. And I still love her every day and sometimes…"

Wherever that sentence was heading gets cut off by surprise tears.

For a few seconds Nora's silent, then she reaches a hand over and puts it to my face. She rubs her thumb gently on my cheekbone. "Peter, I already knew that. Of course you love her. I'm not jealous. You can love me too."

I nod, blinking, placing my hand over hers. There are so many days when I feel adrift, anchoring myself to work and theory instead of therapy and a tempestuous teenager and what groceries to buy and a life that can pull the rug out from under you. But her hand is solid and real.

The box with the ring feels heavy in my pocket. "Wanna get coffee?"

"At eleven thirty at night?" She grins. "Absolutely."


	40. Self Control

**Self Control  
**_#1 Jest _

-/-

Oh God, oh God, don't say anything, that would be really tasteless, Rachel will kick your ass so hard you won't be able to walk for a month, Jake's going to give you one of those impatient "why don't you grow up and _not_ be an insensitive jerk" looks and you'll feel bad, Cassie's going to sigh and turn up her nose at you, Ax won't even understand it, and besides, you _like_ Tobias, at least more than you used to. What's the word Cassie used? "Trigger"? You don't want to trigger Tobias. It doesn't matter how funny you think you are, you don't want to trigger Tobias.

But God, he's the first person to do that kind of morph, and there are just so many good zingers you could come up with, and besides, they're both hot, so it's kind of like a dream come true, right? There are so many ways to make a dream come true joke out of this.

But Tobias looks so wounded, I mean, look at his eyes. Sure, they're hawk eyes, and who can tell if they actually look wounded, but look at him. Do you really want to hurt him? Is it that worth it for you to make some sex crack that you'd rub a little salt in Bird Boy's wounds?

No, Marco. Don't say it, Marco. You're a better person than that. You are not going to go for the cheap shot that won't get any laughter, it'll just make everyone think you're a jackass, which you are, but come on, you're not that big a jackass, are you? And great, everyone is looking at you like they can't figure out why you're biting your lip and keep opening your mouth like you're going to say something, they'll be expecting something profound and you're just going to open your stupid mouth and say something "triggering". Just keep your mouth shut, Marco. You can do it. You're a big boy. You have self-control, you know where the line is, you know when to-

"So Tobias, if I bring my video camera will you morph into Taylor and make out with Rachel?"

Good one, Marco. That wasn't even clever.


	41. The Revenant

**The Revenant  
**_#12 Shock_

-/-

Clara Salazar flicks the lights on as she enters, turning the room from a dark blue to a merry yellow. Her father glares at her from over the corner of the couch, muttering under his breath about the lights making it harder to watch the television, but her stern glance is beyond admonition.

"¿Por que está mirando esta basura?" she sighs. The war is over, and it mostly took place in America, and now all the TV stations are just sorting through the aftermath and the ruins in hope of teasing a last tragic headline out of the whole thing. It's simultaneously disgusting and maudlin, and Clara has no time for it, but her doddering old father seems to believe that whenever a television is set in America, it's going to end with a story about how they finally found his dead daughter's body.

Clara lays out the cooking ingredients she bought on the counter, and surveys the mess of a life she's left to corral. Her father wasn't right in the head in the best of times, but losing his youngest daughter had made him sentimental, had made him retreat into his age and his early-onset senility and his television. Typical Eva, to go crashing through life and leaving destruction and tragedy in her wake, to go leaving Clara to sift through all the wreckage. She just had to go run off to America and marry a man who didn't even speak Spanish and go get herself drowned.

Last Clara had seen of her brother-in-law and her nephew, the little boy was running the show because Eva's husband was in shambles. Predictable. Clara hadn't had the energy or will to add yet another one of Eva's aftermaths to her set of responsibilities, so she hadn't kept in touch. She can't even remember their names or faces now.

"¡Mira, mira! ¡Es Eva! ¡Es mi hija Eva!" Miguel yells from the room. "¡Eva está en la televisión con su hijo!"

"Eva está muerta, papa," Clara says flatly, not glancing up from cutting the garlic.

-/-

*Why are you watching this garbage?  
*Look, it's Eva! It's my daughter Eva! Eva's on TV with her son!  
*Eva's dead, dad.


	42. Clueless

**Clueless  
**_#21 Clueless_

-/-

Peter thought that getting back on his feet would give his son permission to do all the things he'd been missing out on. He thought Marco would finally be able to rest easy knowing that the bills and the rent and all the adult stuff was taken care of. He figured Marco could finally join a sports team if he wanted, or any afterschool activity, or even just spend more time with Jake. Peter thought that now that Marco wasn't taking care of his depressed father, Marco would be able to mourn and let out all those emotions he'd tucked away for Peter's sake.

What Peter didn't know what that by pulling himself back together, he was giving his son permission to go out and nearly get killed every weekend.


	43. Jake Cat All Ball

**Jake Cat All Ball  
**_#11 Cradle _

-/-

Marco figured out before anyone even commented on it that his bipedal capabilities and opposable thumbs are more useful to the team than even the gorilla's considerable muscle and nimbleness. Tending the wounded doesn't seem like abrasive, sarcastic Marco's best trade – it seems like it would suit Cassie better – but here he is, carrying his best friend's sputtering body off the battlefield. With Jake wrapped up in a white lab-coat to protect his identity and looking so puny in Marco's huge primate arms, they look like some comical bastardization of a mother with child.

_Koko's Kitten_, Marco thinks and laughs to himself. He holds the body a bit closer so he can hear Jake's labored gasps and chokes, trying to determine what it is he'd do if Jake stopped breathing. Can a gorilla do CPR? Could he do chest compressions and not turn Jake's insides into a slushie?

{Cassie! You have a horse morph, right? Quick, before they figure out how to follow us.} He doesn't let Jake down for the several more minutes he carries him, but he sags with relief when Cassie finishes the morph and he can dump his buddy on her back. The life of his leader – of his best friend – is really not the kind of burden he likes to haul around.


	44. Retreat

**Retreat  
**_#8 Once _

-/-

I'm not stupid. I'm so many disappointing things, but I'm not stupid. And I'd have had to stupid to not notice something was up with my son. I knew being a single parent to a teenager would require a bit of a learning curve, but I still went in blind, and I think for a long time I tried to attribute all the breaking curfew, all the midnight sneaking out, the chronic exhaustion, the red eyes, the occasional mild amnesia, the sinking grades, the missing clothing, even the shrieking nightmares, pretty much everything to puberty and high school.

I just always tended to let him set the tone and for the most part, that was just not talking about it. You know what it's like, you probably have kids too. I don't know what I suspected – obviously not aliens and war – but I finally conceded to myself that maybe he was involved in something unsavory, or illegal, and I didn't know how to address that. How was I supposed to be the disciplinarian when he'd spent so many years running ship? What if whatever I did ended up getting him in trouble? For both of our sakes I couldn't start alienating him. I knew, I just knew he still needed me as much as I needed him, even if that was just something constant and tolerant whenever he came home, no matter what hour that was at.

So I only brought it up once. It was that week, he probably remembers it, when he just spent the whole week in bed watching TV and staring into space. The same way I did when Eva died. The way he probably would have when Eva died, if he hadn't been trying to keep it together for my sake. I recognized it and I knew right away it wasn't just teenage hormones or school trouble or anything like that.

"Marco? I know you're not sick. Can I come in?" I never entered his room uninvited anymore. I'd run into my fair share of pillows shoved under the covers and that was enough of a message to me that he didn't want me snooping around.

I heard the dull response, and took that as a yes. He was where he'd been for the last six days, halfway under the covers staring blankly at some half-muted Burger King commercial. He didn't even turn his head when I came in.

"Can we talk?"

A shrug. The non-responsive shutdown he'd learned too well from me.

"Marco," I said as I sat on the bed next to him, trying , "you know you can talk to me, if something's going on in your life. I mean, I'd rather you did. And don't try and tell me nothing's wrong."

Nothing. No glib remark, no sly brushing it off, just staring at the television.

"I mean, it was a while ago, but I was a teenager too, once, so I won't laugh if it's, I don't know, girl trouble…" I scanned his face for a response, but he can be pretty unreadable when he wants to be. "Pressure at school? Drugs?"

He finally heaved a sigh, still not looking at me, and said "Dad, in a million years you'd never get it."

"I'm just too old, is that it?" I tried a smile, a little self-deprecating joke, where was the comedian my son usually carried with him, even the cynical, weary one?

"Yeah. That's it," he murmured, shifting a pillow under his head and finally putting the TV on mute.

I took a deep breath and asked "is it because I'm dating again?" and was both relieved and saddened that the answer was neither that nor that simple. Marco just raised his eyebrows at me and shook his head, so I went on. "Are you suicidal?"

That actually coaxed a laugh out, an inappropriate, hollow laugh that didn't do much to reassure me. "You'd think, wouldn't you? Nah, Dad, don't worry about that."

"Not like you'd tell me if you were, right?" I groused, trying not to sulk that my attempts were being rebuffed at every turn. "You teens. You throw all sorts of tantrums and never tell us worried parents what's up."

"Tantrum? This?" He forced a mocking smile and an incredibly fake cough. "Nope, still sick and the doctor prescribed more tube."

I sighed heavily and got up, figuring if I could take years off work I supposed my son could take a week's break for whatever it is that was on his mind. "Well, I'll give you until Monday to get better."

"Dad?"

I turned back around at the strange plaintiveness in his voice. "What's up?"

He stared at me with those eyes that were so like his mother's that looking at them was like opening up that old wound. "Do you think we could go somewhere, for four or five days or something? Just, get out of here and go camping or to Disneyland or anything like that? I hear Disneyland has these five-day passes and…"

He trailed off, eye contact never breaking mine. I didn't understand, but I knew that my answer was important. I've lost so much sleep over that moment, even now, because saying yes was so vital. I should have said yes, should have put forth that vote of confidence, should have just trusted him that he knew what he needed better than I did.

But instead I said "I might not be able to get that much time off, but maybe we could take a weekend off somewhere."

"Forget it." He turned back to the TV, and we never brought it up again.


	45. Spit in the Ocean

**Spit in the Ocean  
**_#5 Misty _

-/-

Every wave they hit sends a flurry of mist up into their faces, an inescapable, tangible reminder that they're alive and aware and awake. Laughing, Eva pushes wet hair from her wind-burned cheeks, squinting through saltwater and sun glare. The weather's too windy for their sailboat, but one of the benefits of having a millionaire for a son is the endless access to other nautical vessels. Their little motorboat bounces and skids across the surface of the water like a skipped rock.

"That's a headline!" Marco yells over the wind as they make a tight turn. "It'll read 'Megacelebrity and His Mother Die in Tragic Boating Accident Because Said Mother Couldn't Spend a Sunday Indoors'."

"You're having fun and you know it!" Eva calls back, bringing the boat around for another fishtail and then, rather suddenly, killing the engine. "There's sea lions over here, I hear."

"Motor's scared them all," he says, finally taking a seat on the now-wet plastic cushions. Even without the motor, the wind still requires a bit of projection to be heard over. "You know how freaked out the ocean made me after you went missing?"

"Not really conducive to swim class, I'll bet."

"Once I knew you were alive, I started using the school pool. I mean, I had to get eaten by sharks first, but I got over it." He gazes out at the ocean, pleased to see no tell-tale fins in the water.

Eva follows his gaze out into the wide expanse of waves and horizon. The sea has no memory of her and her sailboat of old, and the counterfeit death she lived. It's fluid and adaptable, unchanged by any events and any personalities, neither malicious nor reminiscent.

She grins, tasting salt in her teeth. "She didn't take anything but years from us, Marco. Everything else we get over."

He grins back and loudly sings the Jaws theme, knowing that as long as they both believe that, the ocean is nothing but water.


	46. How to Handle Things

**How to Handle Things  
**_#33 Sorry_

-/-

"You said she was going to the marina just to check the ropes?"

"Yes, but I mean, I don't think she'd take the boat out, officer. I don't know, maybe she was right that it wasn't secured, and it got blown out to sea before she got there. She would have called if something held her up."

"You've mentioned that. Well, Mr. Laroche, I'm afraid that in these conditions there's really nothing we can do to check the waters until daybreak, but at the first crack of dawn we'll have a squad out there. I should warn you, though, now that the the boat's missing, it's not looking good. I'm sorry."

"She wouldn't have taken the boat out. She-"

"Dad?"

"Oh, hey, kiddo. What are you doing up?"

"I need more cough syrup. Where's Mom?"

"She's out. I'll get the cough syrup for you."

"Dad? Why's there a police officer here?"

"Oh, um, Officer Kincannon, this is our son, Marco."

"Evening, son. Well, early morning, I guess."

"Hi."

"Marco, I'm just filing a little report, um, property stuff. Nothing you need to worry about. Here's the cough syrup. You should go back to bed. Gotta kick this cold, you know? Sleep it off?"

"Yeah. Dad? Are you crying?"

"Just allergies, kiddo. Go back to sleep. I'll see you in the morning. Night night."

"Night, Dad, officer."

"Mr. Laroche?"

"Yeah?"

"I hate to put this idea out there, but even if she didn't take the boat out, you might want to start calling hospitals and morgues. The conditions out there are ripe for a car wreck."

"Please, not now. Just check the area around the marina first."


	47. You May Be Flat But You're Breathing

**A/N: **The next few are drabbles written off the prompt table, but around the same time period and themes.

**You May Be Flat But You're Breathing**

-/-

"Hace tuto, guagua."

Of all the terrible things Edriss had ushered into her life, Eva just might have hated the portable Kandrona the most. Where once she would simply be escorted to a cage, usually expressing as much disdain to her guards as her soft features could manage, now she kneeled for two hours with her neck fastened and waited as Edriss fed.

"Que viene vaca."

At first she'd mourned the loss of the little freedom she had, thrashed and screamed and bruised her neck against the metal rim of the pool. But that was futile, and so she'd come to relax her body and take what little freedom it still afforded her to heart. For the hours she clicked her tongue and made faces, held imaginary conversations with people, animated exchanges with raised eyebrows and pouts and smirks. And when that finally took too much imagination, she recited the alphabet, the opening to Symphony No. 5, the vowel sounds, eenie meenie miney mo, lullabies, anything to keep her mouth moving freely of its own accord.

She stretched as much as she could and dug her fingers into her thigh, wondering if this was the behavior of a mad woman.

"Duermete, mi niña."

The sensor, reading the pool as empty, released the neck clasp. Her entire body ached from holding the pose.

{Nursery rhymes, Eva?} Edriss asked, wiping the pool sludge and tears from their face. {Surely you can think of a better way to spend your free time than that.}

{I'll see you dead one day,} Eva responded, but with no mouth to speak the words aloud.


	48. People Who Like Angry Music

**People Who Like Angry Music**

-/-

"What are we listening to?" Cassie asks, poking at the offending CD player. "And do we have to listen to it?"

"Nine Inch Nails," Jake sighs. "And not one of the good records."

"Oh, don't tell me you liked Broken," Marco says. "I don't think we could still be friends if you liked Happiness in Slavery."

"It's a bit hard to study when that guy's screaming about having sex with animals in my ears," Cassie winces.

"Having sex like an animal, not with an animal," Marco corrects. "And hey, I know you still think Enya's hard rock, but some of us like a little anger in our music."

"Marco whines enough in real life, so why wouldn't he want to listen to other people whine in his music?" Rachel asks, turning the stereo off with a wink at Cassie. Marco rolls his eyes.

They do their homework in relative silence, punctuated only by the occasional exasperated sigh at the necessity of postulates in their geometry homework. Eventually, Cassie's parents come in and shoo them out, citing weeknights and the need for a healthy eight hours of sleep. As they leave, Rachel pops the CD from the player and slides it into her purse.

"That's mine," Marco points out once they're outside.

"I'm not allowed to like angry music too?" she asks with a coy eyelash bat. "Maybe I liked that animal sex song."

"I guess you would know about animal sex," he grins, dodging her backhand, and hands her the case. "Just try not to scratch it."


	49. In the Shadows of Birds

**In the Shadows of Birds**

-/-

The birds are the first things to come back. Well, birds and gnats, but just the birds sounds better. Now that things are clearing out, you can see seagulls and raptors over the big hole in the middle of the city. I guess that means the mice are back, too.

Life goes on like that. There are mice being eaten now who weren't alive back when downtown got blown to hell. New generations, of bugs and then rats and then dogs and then someday people are going to come and go without ever having witnessed these events. Time just marches forward and doesn't care. I don't know if that's comforting or not.

Eva sits at the table across from me, working on her manuscript. She's writing her memoirs of the war - someone has to, she says, and why not her, when she's one of the most knowledgable former hosts, when she has so much to say and such an excising hand for her own self-pity. She's just going to lay out all the events and then slowly cut away all the emotions until there's nothing but terrible facts. If it helps her heal, good. It doesn't seem to hurt.

I was proofreading it for a while, but she started writing about what people did in the cages and I couldn't handle it.

She drums her fingers against the table like she always used to, takes a sip of her favorite wine. Funny how some of the old routines comes back so easily, and some of them seem like they never will. She has new habits now to add to and replace the old ones; she clicks her tongue and her face settles into a glare when she's lost in thought. Somewhere down the line she forgot that she used to crack her neck while working.

I look away from the muted Padres game and out the window, and listen to the gentle clack of her keyboard and a piano in E minor. The hole outside is crawling with mechanical life, all these construction crews coming through now that the bodies have been excavated. Most of them haven't been identified.

I don't know what I think. I'd be delusional to think my wife and son wouldn't lie to me if they thought it would be easier on me. I don't know if I'm supposed to be in mourning or not for a woman who might not have ever even existed. I don't know if I'm supposed to be looking for her, but the general family consensus is just to not talk about Nora, and I'd be lying if I said it isn't easier that way.

"She liked this piece," Eva says suddenly. "Edriss liked Shostakovich."

"I didn't know she liked music."

"She wasn't supposed to, but she did. Do you remember that night we went to the recital at USD? She was the one who decided to get the tickets."

I didn't know that Eva had been infested at that point, but timelines tend to be like that. You forget what came first and last and misplace conversations and moments in the scramble. "Oh. I saw them do the trios at UCSB last year, but it wasn't as good. Bad acoustics."

I don't mention that Nora was there with me. Our conversations are at least half navigating through a swamp of different we's and us's and them's and her's, just beneath the surface of a dialogue.

"Well, UCSB always was a hole in the ground. Guess now it is literally," she says with that tense smile she's developed. I love her smile, tight as it is, but I worry some days that I'll never again see the loose grin that used to grace our family photos. It occurs to me that all the women I've really loved are in some ways ghosts, or at least somehow intangible.

"Believe me, with those acoustics, that auditorium needed to be Draconed to the ground," I say, looking back out the window to see raptors diving for rats.


	50. Two Soldiers on a Bed

**Two Soldiers on a Bed  
**_#45 Angel _

-/-

The day she tells him there's no body to be found, they watch TV together for seven hours straight. Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, NBC, Comedy Central, Animal Planet, even Lifetime and O!. It doesn't really matter as long as it's distracting and they don't watch any one thing for too long.

Mostly they sit silently on his bed, but as the hours go by they start to comment on the shows they see. Some documentary on animal abuse gets the requisite "Cassie would kill those guys", Rachel can't resist commenting on Buffy's dated clothing, Marco doesn't understand the popularity of Sarah Silverman's comedy although he does admit he very much sees the popularity of Sarah Silverman.

Every once in a while she'll look over and he'll have that vacant expression on his face, and she knows he isn't watching the television anymore. But there isn't anything she can do about that; she's Rachel and he's Marco, and even if she were the hugs-and-sniffles type, he'd never accept it. It's why she's here and not Cassie. She needs to be there because she's damaged and changed and stoic too, and they both understand damage and change and stoicism.

When they hear his dad's car pull up, Marco opens the window for her to leave. "I could stay," she says, knowing he's either too proud or too insecure to ask her to.

"I tell my dad I'm sick and he comes home to find me in bed with a tall blonde girl?" He answers with a forced smile. "No way that's going to end well."

So Rachel nods and morphs eagle, passing the baton to Peter even though Peter doesn't know about all that damage and all that change and all that stoicism.


	51. Love Is Making Other People's Decisions

**Love is Making Other People's Decisions for Them**

-/-

She seems like a woman who used to be playful. I can see why he loved her. We all have hard edges now, but war does that to people. Ages ago, when I was a child, my parents told me I was too soft, and I wonder what they'd think now if they saw their quiet, matronly daughter with an entire vocabulary of words she can't say without snarling.

"I don't do much work in the field," she says apologetically. She pulls papers out of her briefcase. "I'd like to talk with you about this funding proposal. We want to talk to the actual counselors about what your needs are, because Congress thinks they can just throw a bunch of money into a generic 'therapy' slot and tell you all to find the private contractors."

I look around the room where I teach kids to move their hands again, where we all recite vowel sounds to rote and talk about big concepts like 'self' and 'freedom' as if they mean something. My eyes rest on the finger paintings hanging over a chalkboard and it surprises me how many toddlers have learned how to draw their brains in green and black.

We're all so damaged. Why add to the tally? I think about the boy who cut me out to glue his family back together, and I think that's what love is. Love is jockeying for control.

"Don't worry," she says with a bit of bite, "I've done the three-day detox. You can look me in the eye."

I almost say something about the pearl ring on her hand, the hand that flexes and moves absentmindedly, just like mine. I almost mention her son. I almost tell her that of course she doesn't remember me because I never met Visser One, and how tired I am of being lumped in with every other thing that doesn't warrant thinking about to her family. But how do I do that and then turn around and tell little kids to forgive the parents who pushed their heads into the pool? How do I tell them they can start drawing their brains in pink and red, or not drawing their brains at all?

"Sorry," I say. "You probably know how it is, to be free for the first time. I'm not all that much better than the kids, really. We have to teach everyone how to interact again."

"Don't I know it," she says with a raised eyebrow and smirk.

"Can I see that funding proposal?" I ask. "I've always had a gift for numbers. I used to teach math."

She passes it to me. "You'll probably get more out of it than I do. I just do the ideas and the publicity."

Why add to the tally? I look away from the face of the woman I replaced who replaced me, and back to the calming sterility of numbers that add up everything you can put a price on.


	52. Sit Down Shut Up Think About God

**Sit Down Shut Up Think About God or, Are You There, God? It's Me, Marco.  
**_#30 Necromancy _

-/-

"A cockroach? A _cockroach_? Are you serious? And Helmacrons? I just got killed as a cockroach by Helmacrons?"

.

"Seriously, I couldn't even go out getting mauled by Hork-Bajir or falling to my death or doing some heroic sacrifice or something? Helmacrons?"

.

"Oh, man, this had better not be the afterlife. Blank space? No pearly gates and Playstation? This is going to be a really boring eternity if I don't even get to watch some paint dry."

.

"I never thought I'd say this, but I prefer history class to heaven. I'm just going to assume you get better. Or that I did not seriously just die as a cockroach. From Helmacrons."

.

"Look, I really don't want to be dead. Not like this. I have people who need me. I can't be dead."

.

"Do I get reincarnated as Shaquille O'Neal now?"

.

"Hello? Is anyone there?"

I AM HERE.

"Oh, great, it's you."

.

"Who do you think you are, anyway? God? You get the six of us to do your dirty work and act like you're some almighty chessmaster up there, and meanwhile we're getting limbs hacked off and nearly dying? Is that how this works? Because no offense, that's pretty bogus. I'd opt out if I thought I could."

WOULD YOU?

"Didn't I?"

.

"Your game sucks, you know that?"

IT IS UNFORTUNATE, THE WAY THIS GAME IS UNFOLDING. YOU ARE DOING WELL, BUT THE COST HAS BEEN HIGH.

"Yeah, no shit. You know you're dicking a bunch of kids around, right? Jake's aged about thirty years since he was thirteen. And now I'm dead. That's going to be a cheerful team meeting."

.

"You know, my dad, I know he just got married again, but I don't know if he's going to be able to take losing another family member. Oh, God, that's the reason I didn't want to do this in the first place…"

.

"Do I get a redo? Try again? Put another quarter in and go back home and not get killed as a cockroach by the fucking Helmacrons?"

.

"I have to live. My dad and…Jake and the war…my mom…I know, I mean, I know I was careless, but this can't be it."

.

"So is this the afterlife? Some big, blank, cosmic waiting room? Hanging out in Blandsville with the universe's most manipulative shadowy man-behind-the-curtain? What, you can't afford to hire a decorator?"

.

"Am I even dead?"

NO. YOUR TIMELINE DOESN'T END HERE.

"Well, thanks a lot for keeping me updated! I thought I was dead! What's your problem? Is this some sort of game to get me to appreciate life? Because I can tell you right now I already appreciate it a lot. Wait, wait, don't tell me, is this the same kind of mindgame you pulled on Tobias? An 'I'll give you what you want' deal and then what you want turns out to be an even bigger mess than before? There's no way I'm doing that."

WHAT DO YOU WANT, MARCO?

"How about we skip what I want and go straight to what would make me happiest?"

I WAS MERELY ASKING. I DIDN'T PROMISE ANYTHING.

"Thanks for nothing. Again."

.

"So why am I still here? Is this an interdimensional pep talk or something?"

YOU ARE UNCONSCIOUS.

"Are you sure I'm not dead? I just got my heart blown up by the Mighty Midgets. That's usually veering pretty close to dead."

YOU ARE NOT DEAD. WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE?

"Is that a joke? From you?"

.

"You were there, weren't you, on that day I skipped school and ran into my mom again."

YES.

"Not in an always there sense, either. You orchestrated that."

YES.

"You hand-picked us didn't you? Or at least me and Tobias and probably Ax. That's too many coincidences for random chance."

YES. YOU ARE A CLEVER ONE.

"If you weren't such a colossal pain in the ass, I'd take that compliment."

.

"Does it all turn out alright?"

I CAN'T TELL YOU THAT.

"You send an alien prince to give us animal powers, you set me up against my own mom, you have us go head-to-head with an evil race of parasites, and you can't even tell me it turns out alright?"

I DON'T HAVE THE ANSWERS YET. I ONLY MAKE EDUCATED GUESSES.

"What's your educated guess?"

I CAN'T TELL YOU THAT.

"You're so encouraging."

.

"So are you going to tell me about yourself? Or why you've made our lives totally insane?"

I WILL TELL YOU WHEN YOUR TIME COMES.

"Oh. Then tell me later. A lot, lot later."

.

"I'm going to come after you if I get stuck as a roach."

THAT WILL BE UP TO YOU.

"It feels like in about ten minutes, it's not going to be up to me anymore."

.

"So do I ever get to save Mom, or is all this stress about it for nothing?"

I CAN'T ANSWER THAT.

"Okay. Figures. I'll get more specific. Is Mom dead?"

NO.

"…Okay. Okay."

.

"I think I'm waking up now."


	53. Them, Left Behind

**Them, Left Behind  
**_#38 Underwater _

-/-

They never quite recover.

Eventually they reach a state of inertia where his name doesn't get brought up as often and they put up the front of a happy married couple, but if they were on the road to peace of mind, they stalled out a long time ago. They've both resigned themselves to a life with too much space in the seat of the third chair at dinner, with conversations that trail into silences that should be punctuated by the anecdotes neither can bring themselves to speak.

Eva retires, grey-haired and acrimonious, and starts a garden in their backyard. She defends it with unmanageable fury from the crows and gophers that try to sabotage her. Sometimes Peter walks outside and finds her talking to herself, or maybe to the flowers, raging about past evils, muttering curses towards a universe that's conspired against her.

Peter works well past his retirement age, if only to have a reason to get up in the morning. He received accolades and awards for his work with Z-space. He contributes to research that wins a Nobel, and another hole carves itself in his chest when only his loving wife is there to congratulate him when he announces the news.

They attend Cassie's, and then Jordan's, and then Sara's weddings. Eva cries and pretends it's only because the brides and grooms are so touchingly in love. They leave all three wedding receptions early.

Every once in a while, Peter pulls out the album of newspaper and tabloid clippings in the closet. The photo albums and home videos were lost in the war, but there are enough glamour shots and Time profiles that their son's always somewhere in the house, smiling at them, making hand gestures, pouting and raising an eyebrow, laughing.

They still put flowers out on the deck every time his birthday comes around, counting off the missing decades of his life. On the anniversary of his disappearance, they sit in lawn chairs and stare at the stars, though they've long stopped wondering where he is and why he won't call home once in a while.

It only took a decade of misfortune to flood them, and sometime in the last twenty years they surrendered and stayed submerged. No amount of time sorting through the aftermath brings them back to the surface.

But Eva still loves the ocean and Peter waves at kids on their scooters as they ride by the backyard, and they maintain their crafted image of happy domesticity so well they convince everyone on Earth but themselves.


	54. Pack Mentality

**Pack Mentality  
**_#50 Howling _

-/-

Normally Marco isn't the type to this sort of thing, not with all the inherent security risks. But it's been a long few weeks, and he can see the tiredness in Jake's eyes better than anyone else, better than even the people who actually talk about feelings instead of burying them under stoic reserve or forced laughter. And the usual escapes, hoops and videogames, are forever tainted by the enslaved older brother watching in the window, by the pixilated blood that they can too easily envision as real.

So instead they go to the playground, some nights, late enough for it to be dark and early enough to beat the drug dealers. They crouch, shivering in their morph suits, under the slide they used to run up as children.

"What are we doing here, Marco?" Jake asks one night.

"Beats me," Marco says, because the honest answers – coping, forgetting, running away from their problems – would admit defeat if spoken aloud. "Come on."

And once they've become a Labrador retriever and an Irish setter, he adds {now let's go find a stick to play with}.

-/-

Fin


End file.
